Quark’s new Quark Labs website has a new version of Quark’s free Spotlight Filter 2.0 for Mac OS X. This version adds support for QuarkXPress 7 and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, letting you use Spotlight to search for text and other data within all your QuarkXPress documents.

After installing the filter and restarting your Mac, the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 will begin indexing the following data inside all the QuarkXPress 6 and 7 documents on any volumes attached to your Mac:

• Text in text boxes
• Page width and height
• Names of individual Layouts within a Project
• Style Sheet names
• Font names

The filter also indexes documents last saved by QuarkXPress 3, 4, and 5 but it only indexes the text in those documents — not the other document info.

I noticed that Quark’s web page for the Spotlight filter tells how to install it in Mac OS X 10.5, but not in 10.4. To install it in 10.4, simply drag the downloaded file named QuarkXPress.mdimporter file into this folder: Macintosh HD/Library/Spotlight. To begin the indexing process you’ll then need to either restart your Mac or copy some text into Terminal, as described by Luis Diaz in the Quark Forum here.

Jay Nelson

Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.