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Dispatch analyzes QuarkXPress Tag Files (.xtg files) in three stages: Dispatch first locates extended or high-ASCII characters and asks for HTML equivalents. Then, Dispatch identifies each Quark Style for proper HTML treatment. Finally, Dispatch asks for HTML replacements for specific fonts. This process only happens the first time Dispatch encounters a new character, style or font.
Using styles in Quark offers two advantages for converting files in Dispatch. First, the style information can be used to automate data entry. If every time a headline appears in your publication, you use a Quark Style, Dispatch can pull the headlines out of your stories and put them into your database. This saves time and helps prevent typing errors. Second, using Quark styles with Dispatch improves HTML conversion and layout by allowing you to designate specific HTML treatment for each Quark style that is used in your publication. UNDER THE HOOD: When Dispatch converts .xtg files to HTML, it handles each piece of text marked by a Quark style in the order encountered. If a Quark style has HTML assigned to it, that HTML is placed before and/or after the text marked by the Quark style. If a style is assigned to a database Field, Dispatch copies the text to the database or adds this text to the story field if it's also part of the story body (Add to story). Now Dispatch is ready to move on to the next Quark style in your .xtg file. When Dispatch encounters a Quark style it's never seen before, it will need to know a few things:
 Dispatch gives you three pieces of information to help you decide what should be done with a particular Quark style: the name of the style, what file it was first seen in, and some sample content marked by the style.
Sometimes, the body of an article is made up of several Quark styles. These styles don't mark headlines or bylines, so they're not important to the database, but they can have specialized HTML treatment. For these kinds of styles, select
QUESTION: Not important to the database? Isn't the story a database field? Anything placed in Beginning text will be inserted before each occurrence of the Quark style in question, and, likewise, anything placed in Ending text will be inserted after each occurrence. If you leave these text areas blank, the content will be translated normally. The last dropdown, marked ignore, is only used with Quark styles that have database fields assigned to them, so for story styles, keep it set on ignore.
These Quark styles mark pieces of data, i.e., database fields such as Headline, Byline, Summary, Subheadline, UDFs and others. You'll probably want to leave the Beginning and Ending text boxes empty, since the publication templates you use will most likely handle any HTML formatting for these items, and it's better to import fielded data with little or no HTML. The Add to story checkbox determines whether or not content marked by this type of Quark style will be considered part of the story body (in other words added to the story). Most often, database styles are not added to the story and are best removed from the story. The last dropdown, which defaults to Ignore, is used only if the Quark style is a database style (i.e., the Field dropdown is set to something other than -Not a field-). It tells Dispatch how to insert data into the database when there are multiple occurrences of the same Quark style in a single document. The value of the dropdown is applied to the content of each Quark style following the first one. If it's set to Ignore, Dispatch ignores every occurrence after the first.
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Home: Support: File Analysis: Styles | Questions? Comments? Post them to the Dispatch Technical Forum. |
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