Graphics Management & Quark Scripting
Last Modified 6/21/99.

Batch processing and process automation can be applied to many parts of the publishing process. For a long time Quark was the only scriptable desktop publishing application, but now I am keeping my eye on Adobe's InDesign. Adobe has been catching up in the scripting arena and I'm looking forward to exploring what they have to offer.

You can do almost anything with Quark right now. You can automatically create new Quark documents, edit existing ones, and parse them apart, organizing the text and corresponding graphics in databases. I primarily use Cumulus multimedia client server database applications to assist publishing companies in organizing their graphics. It's very scriptable and works well with CD Jukeboxes to allow an entire office access to tens of thousands of original graphic files on CDs. I often use applescript to pair Cumulus with Filemaker to store related text data such history and licensing information. You could also write the script in Frontier and trigger it from a Filemaker script as follows, courtesy of Mike Cohen:

Use the "send apple event" command inside Filemaker Pro's scriptmaker. Send two events. The first is an "open document" event that opens up the Frontier root file in case it's not running. The second one is specified as "other", event class "foo" event ID "subfoo" which corresponded to the address of a script in the Frontier root within the system.verbs.trap table in a subtable called "foo" and within that, a script named "subfoo".

The Frontier Quark glue is very well developed. Frontier is an excellent way to script Quark. However; when I'm creating a script for a client that will need to run without my regular attendance I usually make it an applescript. I have written an example system that transfers data back and forth between Quark, Cumulus, and Filemaker through applescript. This system can parse a Quark file apart and enter all the graphics into a Cumulus database. All the graphics and text into a Filemaker database, and transfer information back and forth between Filemaker and Quark. You can edit the text information in Filemaker and upload the change to the Quark document with the push of a button. Applescript opens up many possibilities with the combination of Quark, Cumulus and Filemaker.

Another applescript utility I've written for working with graphics in Quark is Fit Pictures. Fit Pictures will proportionally resize your images to fit your picture boxes without distortion. It will then resize your picture box to make up for any differences in proportion so your picture box fits snugly around your image. It keeps the picture box centered in it's original location on the page. Fit Pictures will process a whole folder full of Quark graphics at one time.

Besides Cumulus, another excellent graphics management database system is the ImageAXS Pro by Digital Arts and Science. It doesn't have the same type of client server management, but it excels in web management and text field flexibility. It is also highly scriptable. It's not as easy to script as Cumulus, but I've been able to get it to do everything that I ever wanted Cumulus to do in terms of scripting.

A database called Panorama can also contain graphics. I developed a Frontier cgi called searchLynx to search a graphics database for Hindsight Ltd. based on their existing applescript cgi. My portion of the program was actually very easy. The power of Panorama is contained in it's scripts. As a cgi programmer, all I had to do was set a field, run a Panorama script and return a resulting field value. Hindsight Ltd. had already done the hard part of programming the Panorama script to interpret the data. A similar program called forumLynx ran a bulletin board. Two entirely different applications from one database. Hindsight Ltd. has it all figured out. Hindsight's searchLynx is an addition to their StockView graphics management program.

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