MacFormat 1995 September/macformat-028.iso/mac/Shareware City/Comms/Quark to HTML/README

Text File | 1995-03-03 | 3.4 KB | 81 lines | [TEXT/ttxt]

qt2www: Quark Tags to WWW
Version: 1.0 Beta

This is rough documentation for qt2www, which converts text marked
with Quark XPress Tags to HTML. This program is a general-purpose
conversion utility; it reads in a map file that lists the Quark Tags
used in the source file and how they should be translated into HTML.

Version 1.0 beta supercedes Version 0.13 for UNIX and Version 0.9.6 for
Macintosh. The new version adds all the features of the UNIX version to
the Macintosh release; the Macintosh version is now a droplet. Finally,
there have been several internal changes to the code. I don't expect too
many problems, because earlier versions worked smoothly.

I assume that you know how to export text from Quark XPress as Quark
Tags. Check your Quark manual if you don't know how to do this.

The converter is a droplet. Select some express tag files, then drag-and-drop
them onto the Quark to HTML icon. Files with the same name, but with a .html
extension added, will be created in the directory that contains the source files.

The hard part of using the program is setting up the map
file. Unfortunately, I can't provide that for you. Quark Tags are user
defined. When you create a Quark document with style sheets, each of
the styles becomes a Quark Tag.  So if you create a style called
"Body", then your map file must have an entry for the style "Body".

The map file is a plain text file. Each entry has four fields which can be
tab or comma delimited. The first entry is the name of the style. The second
field is the HTML markup (e.g. H2, H3, ADDRESS) to use for this style; you
can also specify the markup Normal, which means that no markup is used for
the style. The third field is the HTML seperator to be used between paragraphs;
this can either be P or BR. The fourth field, which is optional, specifies
highlights for the style -- bold and italic are support.

The map *must* be in the same directory as the Quark to HTML program.

Here are some examples:

Map entry: Headline,H2,P
Quark source: @Headline: This is a headline
Output: <H2>This is a headline</H2>

Map entry: Body,Normal,P,I
Quark source: @Body: This is some body text.
Output: <P><I>This is some body text.</I></P>

Map entry: List,Normal,BR
Quark source: @List: List item 1
List item 2
List item 3
Output: List item 1<BR>List item 2<BR>List item 3<BR>

Comments can be placed in the map file by beginning the line with a
hash mark, '#'.

There are also two things you may need to do to the qt2www.pl script
to get things working. First, be sure that the first line contains the
correct location of your Perl executable file. By default, qt2www.pl
looks for /usr/local/bin/perl.  Second, you can choose to suppress the
status message that are normally generated with the script runs. To
suppress the message, change the value of the variable $status_output
to 'no' (or anything else); message will be printed only if the
variable is set to 'yes'.

That's it for documentation at this point. If you have further questions or
problems, send me email. I'll try to help and I'll add whatever I can to future
versions of this file.

This program was developed at The Tech, MIT's student newspaper. It is
based on a program called q2w3.pl, developed by the present writer and
Reuven Lerner, with help from Ernst Smith. q2w3 was very spefically
tied to The Tech's WWW server, and this program was developed to try
to make that program useful to a wider audience.

Jeremy Hylton
[e-mail]