Have you wondered why Quark dropped the Jabberwocky Sets feature from QuarkXPress 8?
It turns out that because the Jabberwocky feature was added a long time before operating systems began to understand Unicode fonts, it was not Unicode-compliant. Since QuarkXPress 8 relies heavily on Unicode, the Jabberwocky Sets feature had to go.
Now you know.
(More info: in QuarkXPress 7 and earlier, Jabberwocky Sets were different languages that Quark could use to fill placeholder text. My favorite was Klingon. The Jabberwocky feature is still available in QuarkXPress 8 and higher, but only in fake Latin. Just choose Jabber from the Utilities menu)
Popularity: 7% [?]
18. April 2010 at 12:58 pm
Thank you for the explanation of the missing Jabberwocky feature. It says something about my years in publishing that I took comfort in using something so much older than I am, but on a more practical note I have always found it useful to have text blocks that wouldn’t distract a client by having them distracted by a rude proof-read while they should be concentrating on the layout.
So now I have found a website that will generate an lorem ipsum for layout programs to use at “http://www.lipsum.com/”
But I will miss being able to quickly fill a page with Klingon.
22. April 2010 at 11:22 pm
DrawnByPencil: Jabberwocky is still there. So you can still do greeking from within Quark without having to look elsewhere. It’s only the option to do it in languages other than Latin that has disappeared.
16. June 2010 at 5:23 pm
Thanks Jonathan for pointing out that its still there afterall. It is listed as JABBER in the lower half of the Utilities Menu.
I guess Latin is better than nothing although I recall being able to make up my own jabberwocky language using key words from a client’s PR material. I don’t remember if that was built into earlier QXP or as an XTension.
27. July 2011 at 7:30 am
@Mark ‘I recall being able to make up my own jabberwocky language using key words from a client’s PR material’
I remember this too, and I think it was an extension. Worked really well!
Does anyone know who developed this and if, by any chance, it was open sourced?
27. July 2011 at 8:33 am
Hey all, I’m sorry about not being clear in my original post. I edited it just now to make it clear that the SETS feature is gone, but the JABBER feature is still there — but only in fake Latin.
27. July 2011 at 8:35 am
Sam: I’ve searched the Design Tools Monthly database of stories, but haven’t found anything about a third-party solution (or XTension) for customizing Jabberwocky. We’ve covered XTensions comprehensively and in depth since 1992, so I’m pretty sure such a thing doesn’t exist.
I would be happy to be proven wrong, though! :-)
13. March 2012 at 10:31 am
How annoying, as I often use it to give a rough word count for clients but the latin, having longer words, doesn’t give a very true word count, I usually have to add about a quarter to the total.
13. March 2012 at 10:57 am
Jacqui: Good point! I suppose if I were wanting to rely on Jabberwocky for word count, I’d download a text file of nonsense and use that instead of Jabberwocky. I posted a story that highlights some good online sources here: http://www.planetquark.com/?p=5807
16. March 2012 at 1:42 pm
Now my interest is piqued. I work for a small newspaper and we use QuarkXPress 4.1–still does a great job for us (though in an ideal world we’d have the money to upgrade…). Is there a Jabberwocky (or any filler text) option in 4.1, or was it introduced in later versions and then removed with 8? I can’t find it anywhere.
17. March 2012 at 11:12 am
Rebecca: Jabberwocky has been around since 1995, first as an optional free XTension from Quark for QuarkXPress 3, then built into QuarkXPress in later versions.
You’ll find it under the Utilities menu, as “Jabber”. To use it, just click in a text box and choose Utilities> Jabber. Your text box will be filled with fake text.
23. May 2012 at 1:52 pm
As of Quark 4, it was still an XTension. Under Edit > Preferences > Jabberwocky… you could choose to jabber in English, Esperanto, Klingon, Latinesque or Politicspeak. Under Edit > Jabberwocky Sets… you could edit any of those sets by the Part of Speech: either Adjectives, Adverbs, Articles, Conjunctions, Nouns, Proper Nouns, Qualifiers or Verbs. You could also import and Export those sets. Quite a versatile little XTension.
By editing the sets you could get rid of the business-improper words and create something more appropriate.