*Using Quark Xpress 9.5.2, Mac OS X 10.6.8*
Hello Quarkers
I must say that I was very excited to use the digital publishing features of Quark 9. However, unfortunately, I have to say it has been a largely difficult and frustrating experience thus far. It really feels more like a feature that has been rolled out for beta testing than the smooth, intuitive, user-friendly process I feel I was led to believe it was.
While I have managed to figure out how to overcome a large number of problems that I have encountered so far (why is there not more instruction available) there are a couple of problems that I'm still struggling with:
Cover:
While the cover shows up fine in the Kindle app and also iBooks on iPad/iPhone (I have been experimenting with exporting to both epub and mobi) on my Kindle Touch the cover thumbnail does not show up when I view the contents in cover view mode.
Left Margin:
For some reason any text tagged with the body tag has a generous left hand margin that effect the whole paragraph, not just the first line. Is there a way to fix this without using something like Sigil to tweak the css?
Failed export:
I often end up with a message of failure when exporting to kindle (pub is fine). It tells me to check document level elements and try again (or words to that effect). I have no idea why this happens or where to start looking.
Messed up TOC:
For some reason, often the chapters in the table of contents link not to the 'Section / Chapter' Name tag (ie the start of the chapter) but to random points in the flow of text. Rectifying these issues seems to be a case of reimporting the effected text – surely there's another way?
Time consuming distribution of pictures:
The document I am working on has many pictures with captions distributed throughout. These are not anchored in the text as they spill outside of the text box margins. Unfortunately, what happens when converting to reflow is every picture and caption ends up in a jumbled up order at the end of the text. Is there a quick way to reorder them?
Suggestions:
Based on my experience so far, I have a couple of suggestions for improvement. As follows.
For someone who is new to this feature (i.e most people) it is not clear how important a part the tag mapping plays in building your table of contents. Currently, it seems that, as a first time user of the digital publishing feature, you have to make educated guesses at the appropriate text tagging and, when presented with your converted reflow, if you are not happy with the reflow text tags that you had chosen for certain style sheets, there is no quick way to change them.
1) Why can you not go back into layout view change the reflow tag mapping and apply your changes to the reflow view?
2) Also, a different find/change in reflow view which has text tagging in the attributes for making sweeping changes would be a good idea
3) Keyboard shortcuts for quickly applying text tagging
4) Why no Caps/Small caps in the clickable styles
5) Selecting and moving items up and down the articles list is painful. The drag option does not work very well and sometimes (long documents with many components–images, captions pullouts etc) you have to hit the up or down arrow scores of times to get an article or component where you need it to be. Why no right click> move component to article x. Cut/paste articles/components. Shift+click multiple items etc?
6) Kindle previewer. Kindle has a previewer app. Would it be possible to integrate this (or similar) to quicken the review process. In other words in reflow view you would click file>preview as kindle/epub etc
Anyway, suggestions for improvement aside, if anyone has the answer to my questions above, I'd be most grateful.