[timmerk]

Hi,

I got a job working for a newspaper company. They use QuarkXPress for the paper. They want me to try to design a nice solution for transferring the content of the paper onto a dynamic web site.

Any ideas how to do this without making the layout people do that much extra work, if any at all? I want to do the website in PHP and MySQL. They have Macs and PCs. Not sure if they have version 6, but I heard 6 had XML export. Would this be an easy way, or would you have to specify how to export it each time? What about AppleScript?

I'm just trying to make it automated as possible. Right now, they just copy and paste the text into a online form which just creates a static HTML file.

Thanks!

[Chuckit]

I've never tried to do anything like this, but from the user end of Quark, I imagine automating the process would be kind of hard. The reason is that Quark doesn't really distinguish between elements of the same basic type. I don't see how an automated solution would be able to tell the difference between stories, headlines, breakout boxes, text shadows, flags and all the other textual elements of a newspaper, many of which wouldn't be treated alike by a Web site and some of which probably wouldn't appear at all.

I've spoken to people who actually have companies dedicated to this (like College Publisher, which provides Web sites for school newspapers), and they use the online form too, but the stories go into a database on the server rather than a static HTML file. So probably your best bet is just to modify that interface that they're used to.

[Macola]

Try a demo of this:

http://www.catbase.com/products/index.html