If you need to extract text from QuarkXPress documents, there is no easier or more powerful way that I’m aware of than Vision’s Edge’s TeXTractor. This $99 XTension for QuarkXPress 6, 7 or 8 for Macintosh lets you export all the text in a document or selected portions of the text using any filter currently available to QuarkXPress. You can export only text that has a particular style sheet applied to it, or only text that was imported into QuarkXPress. You can even choose which stories should be exported from a document and rearrange the order in which they are exported.

You can even indicate a “page area,” outside of which no text exports, or have TeXTractor place markers in the exported text to indicate the beginning and end of stories, as well as on what page numbers the stories were found in the original document.

TeXTractor also offers batch processing mode, enabling you to export text from multiple QuarkXPress documents at once — either in one folder or an entire list of folders. You can even time-delay text extraction sessions so that they run unattended, either once a day at a certain time, or at intervals throughout the day.

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.