by Tami Stodghill

If you're tasked with getting out what was once put in — text that is — TeXTractor for QuarkXPress 8 will fast become your favorite XTensions module. Now supporting QuarkXPress 8 (and 4, 6, and 7, too), breathe easy knowing that you can give your cut and paste keys a rest.

TeXTractor is one of those XTensions® that those of you who work with archiving or repurposing extensive text files in QuarkXPress® will come to fully appreciate. This brawny utility exports text from QuarkXPress projects, singly or in batch — completely eliminating the cut-and-paste routine you've been stuck with to date.

TeXTractor makes it easy to extract all or part of the text from a single QuarkXPress project. Just open the project with text to be extracted. Choose utilities > extract text. Select your preferred extraction method. TeXTractor can extract text from QuarkXPress projects using four different methods. All methods require that you select an export filter, but some methods require additional set up.

Using the entire document method, no additional set up is required and all text within the margins is extracted. With the Selected Styles method, you can select the style sheets to be extracted. When using the selected styles method, only text within the margins that has the selected paragraph styles applied to it is extracted. TeXTractor extracts up to ten style sheets.

You can opt for one of four options when text is extracted (exported):

• All boxes — export all text in the document and optionally maintain text links and story continuity or export the text, box by box.
• Style — export all the text that has a specified style sheet applied to it and, optionally, what style text TeXTractor should export.
• Imported stories — export only the text stories that have been imported into the document.
• Tagged stories — export only text stories that have been tagged using TeXTractor's story-tagging dialogue.

Extensive exporting features

TeXTractor is intended for those of you who export text from QuarkXPress projects for use in other projects such as publishing to the web or archival-text storage. Text extraction may be limited to text with a certain style sheet applied to it, or text that was initially imported into QuarkXPress.

TeXTractor enables you to export from a QuarkXPress project to a single text file and export some or all of the text in the document by one of four different criteria:

• entire document;
• text that has certain style sheets applied to it;
• selected stories; or
• text that has any style applied to it.

Some of the cool features and controls you have include the ability to limit text exported to only the text inside of specific page margins, the ability to allow pre-selection of up to 19 folders of QuarkXPress projects from where text is to be exported, the option to reschedule text exporting at intervals of up to 24 hours, and the option to select what stories should be exported (even arranging the order that they are exported).

It all begins with the the TeXTractor for QuarkXPress 8 preferences. These settings let you really control the defaults for extracting text. Click export preferences In the tab panel of the preferences dialog to access options for various attributes that predefine the extracting of text, as well as naming conventions.

Choose QuarkXPress > preferences > TeXTractor and click the export tab. Enter a length for the file prefix to set the maximum length of the file name (excluding the file extension), when folders are extracted. When extracting text from a single project, you’d use this preference to create the name for the save dialogue. The file name extension field allows you to set the extension (e.g., “.TXT”) of the file name when folders are extracted.

Figure 1 Begin with the preferences so that your results are as expected.

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