How To Replace E-book Text in Reflow View
Yesterday I was working on converting a printed book into an e-book for a client, and discovered that the text file he had provided was older than the final text that was used in the printed book. So, I needed to give the text back to him for editing.
Unfortunately, I had made some changes to the text and had already tagged the text in QuarkXPress’s Reflow view — which is where all the e-book goodness happens. The problem is that Reflow view doesn’t provide a way to export and import text without losing the tags. It’s intended to be used after all the text is final.
But fortunately for me, his book is a simple novel, and I hadn’t yet broken it up into multiple components to create new chapters. And that saved my bacon — I was able to easily export the text in Microsoft Word format and maintain the tagging via Style Sheets.
Here are the steps I took:
- Copied all the components from Reflow view into a text box in Layout view. Fortunately, there were just a few.
- Created Style Sheets that match the names of the Reflow Tags, then used Find/Change to apply these Style Sheets to the appropriate paragraphs. Again, I was fortunate that the main body of the text didn’t use a lot of tags.
- Exported this text as a Microsoft Word document. (File> Save Text…)
- Gave this file to the author to edit in Word, warning him to be careful not to disturb the Style Sheets.
- When he’s done, I’ll import the text back into Layout view, then extract it into Reflow view using Quark’s feature that maps Style Sheets to Reflow tags.
Another option would have been to give him the QuarkXPress document and let him edit it in Reflow view. But that process would have some drawbacks:
- It would have required that he have QuarkXPress (or at least the free 30-day trial version).
- There would be no easy way to archive his final text in Word format.
Since he’s proficient in Word, and my formatting in Reflow view wasn’t very complicated, the export-edit-import path seemed the most straightforward for everyone.
I hope this helps someone facing a similar challenge…
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.
Hi, I was very interested to read your post above, but I’m having considerable difficulty with one step… that is making the Style sheet activate the first line indent that I’m looking for.
I created a paragraph style sheet with the attributes I wanted, namely 5mm indent on the first line and renamed it Pullquote, as I didn’t need that in my novel, and mapped it to the. However, I couldn’t manage to follow how to get the Pullquote in the reflow view to do anything other than what it was programmed to do in the first place! I realise that I’m missing a step somewhere, but, try as I might, I cannot find it.
I do find your site very informative and usually manage to get the help I need, but this time, I’m afraid, I’m going to need a little more help.
Thank you.
oops! I mapped it to the tag of course…!
Oh, and one more question that you may be able to answer… why does it take around half an hour to add pages to the reflow view? It doesn’t matter whether it’s 2 pages or 200.
Having thought about this some more, I decided that I’d see if I could use invisibles to find/change. First time I tried it, I did it in Reflow View… that crashed Quark. So, I tried it again in Layout replacing “Return” (\p) with “Return + Tab” (\p\t) and that sorted it. Well, at least it has put in a tab space after every return. Shame that the space is bigger than 5mm, but I’m not sure that it’s worth the grief of doing it all over again!
That has solved the very simple thing that I needed to be done, but it would be a lot easier if the Style Sheets could be used automatically.
And that didn’t work when it was exported to Kindle!
All it did was replace the tabs with an extra line break!
So far, so bad. I had to resort to exporting the text into Word and upload that to get it converted by Amazon.
Seriously unimpressed.
Oh, and one more thing, there doesn’t seem to be any way to create a table of contents in quark either. Poor effort Q!
Sorry, that last comment is misleading… the TOC can be created, it just can’t be recognised by Amazon when it’s converted.
Hi Tony,
I’m Sarah writing from Quark. Thanks for your comments and questions. Would you mind emailing pr@quark.com so I can connect you with our support team? If you want to include the OS and OS version in your email, that will help the team.
Thank you!
Sarah