For reasons that have long escaped me, QuarkXPress has no automatic method for making bullet points (or numbered lists for that matter). There’s no magic button, as in MS Word, that gives you an instantly formatted bullet point that’s easy to customise.

If you’re importing text from MS Word (Word 2003 at least) using File>Import Text, your bullet points will disappear. The way I get around this is to follow the steps outlined on this post and this one. This also assumes your MS Word document is built on styles and you have set one up for bulleted lists.

Once your text is in QuarkXPress, you can then change the bullet character using Find/Change and deselecting the Ignore Attributes box — this allows you to change the font, colour and character. Because I produce mostly text-based publications I’m quite conservative with bullets, using solid squares and circles, but it’s a matter of personal choice.

Formatting your bulleted lists

There are essentially two ways to format bulleted lists; with a hanging indent and without. Again, it’s a matter of personal taste — hanging indents (the first example) look more distinct in my opinion, but if you’re typesetting to very narrow columns, non-hanging indents might be more appropriate.

To make the hanging indent, as in the first bullet point, edit your style and go to the format box. In the Left Indent box, enter a positive measurement; in the First Line box, enter an identical negative measurement. In this example, I used values of 5mm and -5mm.

For the non-hanging indent, you simply have to enter a single figure in the Tabs box (again, 5mm).

To make a subordinate bullet

I still find this non-intuitive, but the method is simply to double the value of the Left Indent. If I needed a subordinate bullet for the hanging indent on this example, I would use a value of 10mm for the Left Indent and -5mm for the First Line.

More bullet point tips

Instant bullets

There is an alternative to the method described above, which might be useful if you’re doing your composition in QuarkXPress rather than MS Word:

1. Type Alt-Shift-8 to bring up a circular bullet (Option-8 on a Mac)
2. Press the tab key once and then enter Ctrl-Z (or Option-Z). This gives you a hanging indent.
3. Adjust the size of the hanging indent using the Tabs box.

Images as bullets

It is possible to use an image as a bullet point. The basic principle is to draw a (small) picture box on the pasteboard with the object tool and then import an image into it. Press copy (or cut), switch to the content tool and then paste it into the text. You will have to experiment with the size of the picture box so as not to affect the line spacing.

Insert a single symbol from the keyboard

Although this doesn’t seem to work on all versions and platforms, for a single Zapf Dingbat character (if you have it installed), press Ctrl-Shift-Z (or Cmd-Shift-Z on a Mac) then type a character. For a Symbol character, press Ctrl-Shift-Q (Cmd-Shift-Q).

Word 2003 produces some pretty horrible code too and less web functionality – I’m informed that Word 2007 has improved this somewhat, but still has some way to go. (If you have experience of Word 2007 and Quark, please leave a comment on this page.)

Here’s an illustration. Open up Notepad (or similar) and type the following:

<p>Hello</p>

Select ‘Save As’ then type ‘file.htm’ into the filename box, which will produce an HTML file with the icon of your default browser. Double-click the file to view the results. As a comparison, open up MS Word, type in ‘Hello’ and save as a webpage. Then open up the file in Notepad to see the code. You’ll agree that it’s awful and there’s a lot of it. (QuarkXPress is no better.)

The straightforward way to publish online is to make a web-optimised PDF, but there are also good reasons to do it in HTML. There are proprietary tools that will produce nice code for you, but buying such a product might not be an option.

What I’m going to describe is tricky and a bit of a work-in-progress. It’s not an elegant solution, but it works okay and will hopefully save you some time. It’s a better alternative than making a text-only file and then formatting paragraph by paragraph.

Why is ‘nice’ code important?

The main reason is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Like the style functions in Word and Quark, they remove the need for manual formatting and keep the content and formatting separate. Without formatting to worry about, all you mostly need to do is produce bog-standard HTML (with perhaps some additional styles created by whoever wrote the CSS). This is the whole principle on which WordPress and other blogging platforms are founded and the reason why we can change our page templates so easily.

Additional reasons to use standard code are accessibility and the desirability of keeping file sizes down.

The aim of this tutorial

This tutorial will essentially describe how to convert a long text-string from Quark into HTML. It is likely that you’ll still need to go into the code to fix some glitches and you’ll have to add any images, tables and suchlike manually. It’s a bit of a hack solution, but it has worked for me. As always, if you have any suggestions, please email me or leave a comment.

Structural considerations

The structure of HTML is essentially similar to any large document. In a book, you’ll have a visual hierarchy of styles where, for example, a chapter heading is superior to a main heading, which is in turn superior to a subheading. Likewise in HTML there are headings <h1> to <h6>. Likewise you’ll be using ordered (numbered) lists and unordered lists (bullet points), corresponding to <li> tags, which in turn are wrapped in the <ol> and <ul> tags respectively. Your body copy will correspond to the HTML paragraph style <p>. In a book or report, the chances are those tags and styles will correspond to the vast majority of your document. The trick is to produce plain text that is wrapped in these tags.

Step-by-step HTML from Quark

1. Get rid of all formatting, numbers and bullet points

To guard against any residual fonts creeping into the HTML, convert all the text to 12pt Times New Roman. You can do either do this in the style sheets or by deleting fonts in the Usage box and replacing them with Times New Roman. Use find and replace to get rid of all the bullet points in the document. You’ll also need to get rid of all the numbers in numbered lists. (Of course, this assumes your bulleted lists and numbered lists are built using styles.)

Bear in mind the aim is to produce HTML — the CSS and the browser will do the formatting for you.

2. Save the text as MS Word

Save to Word using File>Save Text (if you’re unsure how to do this, it’s on the same principle as the method discussed here). Your Quark styles will follow through into the Word version

3. Apply Word styles to the text

Open up your new word file. In Word, Format>Styles and Formatting will display the styles. Now, this is where it gets a bit tricky as Microsoft has generally overcomplicated this function and it’s a mess. You may have to go to the bottom of the Styles and Formatting pane and select Show: Custom, then display all styles.

The heading styles you’re looking for are Heading 1 to Heading 6, which correspond to <h1> to <h6> in HTML. By convention, Heading 1/<h1> is the title. Click on your main heading style, select ‘Select All’ on the drop-down menu, then apply Heading 2. Apply Heading 3 to the next style and so on.

For body text, you need to apply the style Normal (Web).

4. Bullets and numbers

Bullets and numbers are tricky – try as I might, I couldn’t find a solution that produced the right tags. The solution is a hack – select the styles that apply to bullet and numbers and apply one of the near-redundant html styles on the list (I use HTML typewriter). You may want to apply others if you have well-used styles, although keep a note of what they are.

5. Save as html and fix the code

Saving as ‘Web page, filtered’ seems to produce better results than save as ‘Web page’. You can then open up your file in Notepad to do some more fixing.

• All the code before the first line of copy and after the final line can be deleted. If you use a content management system like WordPress, you don’t need them. If you’re passing on the html to a webdesigner, then he or she can sort it out. If you’re doing it yourself, you’ll know what code to use
• The bullets and numbers, to which you’ve applied an redundant style, will have code like this:

<p class=MsoNormal><tt>Bullet point 1</tt></p>

You can fix this using find and replace. In this example, replace <p class=MsoNormal><tt> with <li> and change </tt></p> to </li>. These will all display as bullets in a browser. To make strict HTML, you’ll have to manually add <ul> and </ul> before and after these list tags to make proper bullets and <ol> and </ol> to make numbers.

• You’ll have to do a similar hack for any other styles you’ve defined in this way with a different format. You may want to use <blockquote> for example.

6. Open up in a web browser and check your work

What you’ll see won’t look that special – the text will take on the default characteristics of your browser – but hopefully the structure will be okay. If anything looks awry, you’ll have to go into the code and fix it. The most usual problem is font tags creeping into the HTML, which you don’t want. Other tags in your original file, such as ones for superscript, italic and so on may also have gone missing.

The basics

When you go to File>New Project dialog box, there’s an unassuming orange Quark symbol at the bottom left. Clicking on this button brings up this dialog box.

(If you have an existing job open, you can also go to Layout>Layout Properties and change the Layout Type from Print to Web, although you might want to do this to a copy of your original.)

There aren’t too many options to worry about. Checking Single Layout Mode creates a project where the pages are all the same size. You can fix the width of the page in pixels or have a variable width that resizes with the browser window. There are some colour options and the ability to set a background image on the page.

General features

As you’d expect, working in the Quark web layout is fairly similar to working in the print layout. There’s an additional tools palette, which contains tools for making buttons, forms, tick boxes and the like. However, as someone whose only real experience is creating static webpages, there’s no way of making the buttons or tickboxes do anything.

HTML is obviously much more limited in its formatting options than QuarkXPress and several features unsupported by HTML don’t work in the web layout, for example kerning and fine control over leading. On more elaborate layouts, Quark will solve issues such as wrapping text around an object by converting it into a graphic.

Producing the HTML

Simply go to File>Export>HTML and press OK. Pages will export as HTML files and all images will be stored in a separate folder called ‘images’. There’s no built-in FTP client and, at least in Windows, saving to ‘My Network Places’ doesn’t seem to work. Therefore you’ll need to save to your hard drive and upload using an FTP client — I personally use the free FireFTP plug-in for the Firefox browser.

It’s not necessary to downsample your images, as the export feature will produce new web-optimised images for you.

Cascading style sheets

Cascading style sheets (CSS) are to the web what the Style Sheets function is to Quark. They separate the formatting from the content and are therefore very powerful. All websites worth their salt use CSS; however, unlike Quark Style Sheets, they’re responsible for a lot more than just text and essentially control the entire look of a website.

Quark does include a limited amount of CSS support, but this seems to be restricted only to text. Of course you can make global changes to your site by editing the Quark Style Sheets, but for many features you’ll have to edit pages manually, which is very time consuming.

A personal project

I created an online CV using QuarkXPress — I’ll keep some anonymity by not linking to it, but the layout and structure are similar to this online resumé.

I created the basic layout — the header, footer and left-hand navigation panel — on a Quark master page and used the two-button rollover feature to create the effect on the left-hand panel. Each document page in Quark corresponded to a single HTML file. Here’s my verdict:

The good

• If you’ve a reasonable knowledge of Quark, it’s very easy to use. You’ve got most of the Quark functionality and you need very little knowledge of HTML — all you have to do is upload your outputted files onto your web server
• The rendering is very good — the web page produced by Quark looked very much like what I’d laid out on the page. It displayed correctly on the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox.

The bad

• Very limited CSS support. If your website requires moderate-to-major changes, you may end up having to do much of it by hand. Also, this is likely to affect the accessibility of your website to people with disabilities
• Big file sizes. I’ve been learning CSS recently and eventually felt confident enough to code my website by hand. My version, including images, came in at 80KB. The version produced by QuarkXPress was a whopping 600KB! (And this was in no way an elaborate website.)
• Lack of basic functionality. For example, try as I might, I just couldn’t centre my webpage in Quark. I also couldn’t link to an image hosted on another server — Quark just made a copy of the image and used that
• Fairly horrible HTML. I’m no expert, but there’s a lot of it and it’s a bit unfathomable
• I built my site around a master page and you would imagine that Quark would output those files once and add the variable parts, right? Wrong! It made individual image files for every page
• There’s no real way of editing the HTML to make small changes. You have to open up QuarkXPress, re-output the page and the corresponding images, then re-upload them to your webserver.

Conclusions

I’ve been a bit negative regarding this feature, but then I know some HTML and CSS and have some knowledge of the web in general.

However, if you’re called upon to make a straightforward, static website that doesn’t have that many pages — and you have QuarkXPress already — then this is a decent option, if you can cope with the large file sizes and lack of accessibility features.

The best resource for this is probably the QuarkXPress forums.

How much bleed depends on your printer — typically they request 3mm or 5mm. It’s a good idea to check this before you start your project as it saves time later.

Here’s a screengrab of a coloured area at the left-hand edge of an A4 landscape page. The black edge is the page edge and you’ll see that the magenta box is overlapping (bleeding) over each end.

This is easy to achieve using the control panel. To do 3mm of bleed overall, draw a picture box anywhere and set both the X and Y co-ordinates to -3mm. As the page is A4 (297x210mm), it needs to have 6mm added in both dimensions so it bleeds over all the edges. Therefore, the width and height measurements are set at 216mm and 303mm. If you need 5mm of bleed, the X and Y co-ordinates would both be -5mm and the size of the box would be 220x307mm.

Crop marks

When you output the file using the method described on this page, you’ll be presented with the ‘Marks’ series of options. The good news is that, if you’re using standard bleeds of 3mm or 5mm, you generally don’t have to worry about changing the defaults — just select ‘Centred’ for the mode. (There’s also a mode called ‘Off-centred’, which I’ve never used — one day I’ll find out what it’s for.)

I’m mentioning this only because I once had to output a cover for a hardback book at a specialist printer, who requested 20mm of bleed. After a lot of fiddling about, I realised the essential principle is that the length of the marks must always exceed the bleed. The width of the marks and the offset (the distance between the edge of the image and the edge of the page) stay the same.

Bleed options

For a print job, in the Bleed options, you will nearly always want to select the ‘Symmetric’ type (i.e. the same on all four edges), then enter the amount of bleed in the box. Leave ‘Clip at Bleed Edge’ unchecked.

If you’re also doing a web version, however, you don’t want any crop marks and bleed. In this instance, turn off the crop marks in the Marks box, set the bleed amount to zero and select ‘Clip at Bleed Edge’.

I personally distill my PostScript files to a preset I set up myself called ‘internet’. It gives smaller file sizes than Distiller’s own preset ‘smallest file size’. I arrived at these settings through trial and error, but they work well for me. Click on the images below to start a slide-show. Again, if you’ve anything to add, please post a comment.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

I’m not the world’s best commentator, so you’ll have to forgive me. If you’re interested, the video was created using a very handy bit of software called CamStudio (from camstudio.org) and uploaded onto Veoh.com (whose quality appears to be better than YouTube’s). As always, comments are welcome.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Here are some screen captures to show the options you may need to change when your making your PostScript file for PDFing. Click on the first image to start the slideshow and press ‘next’ to advance.

Note: As the commentary on crop marks was admittedly a bit sketchy, you may wish to read this post.

If you place the cursor inside a text box and go to File>Save Text, QuarkXPress will let you save the entire story — the contents of the text box and all those linked to it. If you select some text additional options will appear; either to save the selected text or the entire story.

You are presented with a number of options in the ‘Save as Type’ drop-down menu, although you will presumably want to save to the most up-to-date version of Microsoft Word.

There are sometimes good reasons to do this — if authors decide to do a substantial rewrite, or wish to update a previous version of a publication, it makes sense to let them edit the text directly. Of course, this may only be a good thing if your publication is essentially a single, long text thread. You may wish to sit down with authors and explain how the formatting works, to avoid having to tidy up their text too much at a later stage.

Depressingly, the other reason you get asked is because some people assume there’s some magic feature that transforms a Quark document into a faithful Word version (or that you’ve managed to do it in Word in the first place). And there obviously isn’t. Any independent elements such as manual footnotes, tables, standalone text boxes and images will not export.

What to look out for in your Word export

• The good news is that exporting to Word from Quark brings all your Quark styles into Word. This is a huge time-saver, as your styles should be intact when you import it back again using File>Import Text
• It’s likely that you’ll be using fonts the author doesn’t have and these will carry through into the Word version. There are two options here. The first is to go to Tools>Options>Save in MS Word and embed the fonts in the document. If that’s unsatisfactory, then edit the Word style sheets to change the fonts to standard Windows (or Mac) ones. When you import the text back into Quark, it should change them back to the fonts you defined in your Quark style sheets
• Certain Quark-specific functions, for example thin spaces and non-breaking hyphens, aren’t recognised by Word. They will probably export as square-shaped characters in the text. However, they should be restored when you reimport into Quark, so tell your authors to ignore them
• The Word export will convert your defined colours to RGB. Although coloured text should be converted back to the colour defined in the style sheet, the RGB value will appear in your colours palette and may be lurking somewhere in your document. To be on the safe side, delete this colour from the palette and replace it with the correct one
• Any text not defined by a style in Quark tends to look horribly unformatted in the Word version
• The process is not foolproof and you should still check the Quark version carefully after you reimport the text. Don’t come running to me if it goes wrong!

The product is called qXport and the link to the English version of the site is here (although not all the links on this area of the site seem to work). There is a free trial version, which I might have a play with. If anyone’s any experience of this, please post a comment.

Here’s the dialog box that appears when you draw a table using the table button on the toolbox.

Filling in the rows and columns fields is self-explanatory. Selecting ‘text cells’ is probably the option you need for a standard table (the other option allows you to import an image behind, but that’s too ambitious for me).

The remaining options are essentially around importing text into your tables. For a small table, it’s probably best to enter the data yourself; for a longer one, it’s better to get the author to provide an Excel file and import that. (For an overview of importing from Excel read this post.)

Some formatting tips

Resizing rows and columns

You will have to do some manual resizing and this is done using the contents tool.

• Resizing columns vertically is a little bit idiosyncratic. Take some time to play around with this function to get used to how it works.
• The best way to set the height of rows is probably to select the row(s) and enter a number into the control box. As most rows in tables tend to be a single line in height, set this value, then resize the few rows where there is more text.

Formatting using the object tool

The following are all done using the object tool, selecting Item>Modify.

• If you’re using gridlines, you can format them all at once by selecting the Grid tab (as shown above). I usually set gridlines to 0.5pt, but that’s your choice
• Select the Frame tab and set the border to 0pt, as otherwise you get a thicker border compared to the rest of your gridlines.

Formatting using the content tool

Selecting all the cells in the table:

• Visually, I think it looks better to centre the text in tables vertically — do this by selecting ‘Centred’ on the Vertical Alignment option
• Set the text inset within the cells to an appropriate value.

Anything else?

• You can set Runaround whether you’ve selected the table with the content or object tools. This is the easiest way of offsetting the text around it
• There are obviously lots of other formatting options to play with and your use of these obviously depends on how much time you have (usually not enough) and how artistic you are (personally, not very).

Where to put tables

• Visually, you’ll really want to make the width of your table a multiple of however many columns you’re using — for example, on a two-column layout, your tables should be either one or two columns wide. Wrapping text in the middle of a column using Runaround, for example, usually doesn’t look that great
• Avoid breaking a column into two with a table. I tend to put them at the top or bottom of pages
• Tints are a good idea (for the header row for instance). I’ve found that 20% is a good minimum value. On screen, 10% often looks fine, but I’ve found it looks very faint when printed
• There’s nothing to stop you running a table across a spread if it’s very big, but do be careful, as you have to anticipate how it will look on the finished job.
• Apply runaround to the table and to the table caption, whether it’s above or below the table. Make sure your runaround settings are enough to offset all the body copy (sometimes stray lines can get lost amid tables and captions).

Some editorial considerations

• As I’ve mentioned in other postings, authors have a habit of putting tables directly below the relevant text in their MS Word files. They then refer to them as ‘the table below’ or ‘the table overleaf’ and so on. These instructions will probably be completely irrelevant once it’s typeset, so edit any copy to say ‘see Table 3’ or ‘As Table 3 shows…’ and do your best to get the table on the same page or the same spread.

I’ve noticed several queries in my stats bit of WordPress enquiring about importing Excel tables, so I thought I’d better write a few words. I think this feature appeared in Quark 7, but it wasn’t immediately obvious. It’s quite easy to do (though less easy to find).

On the tools box, click on the tables button and draw a square. The following box will appear (I’ll assume you’ll have a likely Excel file to link to):

Ignoring the rest of the dialog box, select ‘Link to External Data’ and press OK. Another box then greets you:

I’m guessing the only spreadsheet most people have is Excel, which is what appears in the ‘Type’ field. Use ‘Browse’ to select your file.

If your spreadsheet’s a fairly simple one, the Excel table values will appear automatically — I must admit, I’m not an Excel fiend but simply ask authors to provide big tables as simple Excel files on the strength of this function. More complex tables may require some manual definition over which cells to import. Whether you need to select any other options is entirely up to you, though I suspect it’s best to keep these things simple. Turning off Include Geometry maintains the size of the table you will have drawn using the table tool on the Tools palette, while turning on usually gives you a table bigger than your page. Either way, you’ll probably have to tidy it up manually.

If you work for a financial institution, for example, you may have to explore these functions more closely as you’ll presumably be linking to live files produced by annoying and shouty financial types.

And that, dear reader, is basically it — press okay and all the data appears in your Quark table. The only things you may need to bear in mind are:

1. Although the numbers import reliably in my experience, you’ll still have to do the table formatting yourself. Still, it’s better than the old days of mucking around with millions of tabs and drawing the lines yourself
2. Importing a table creates a link to the file you imported it from, in the same way as importing a picture. Go to Tools>Usage and the link to your file will be sitting there. It’s something to bear in mind if the Excel file is sitting on a server and people are still editing it. If it’s sitting on your hard drive, then you can leave it where it is or delete it (Quark will tell you it’s missing, but it won’t change the data you initially imported unless you tell it to).