by Tami Stodghill

...my hero! (sigh)!

I remember working side-by-side with a friend of mine a number of years ago. We were both working separately on portions of a large catalog, using QuarkXPress. Intermittently we would chat, but both of us pretty much were lost in our own worlds, putting together our respective portions of the document. Then — out of nowhere — comes this sound the likes of which I never care to hear again. My friend looked to be on the verge of tears as well, stood up and left the room without so much as a word. Needless to say, I was freaked out; and a quick trip over to her computer screen gave me the explanation I was looking for. There it was — the terrifying bad file format error.

I knew the feeling that had my friend and co-worker fleeing...I had experienced it before. Most of us have at one time or another. Immediately you start going through your mind trying to calculate the lost time, how you will possibly make your deadline, and maybe even why you are in the publishing industry to begin with.

Markztools	Markztools

Here’s where MarkzTools rides in on its white horse. MarkzTools is one of those XTensions that never seems to catch your eye until you need it; but when you need it, there is nothing that could keep you from your quest to buy it. MarkzTools can be used to prevent corrupted QuarkXPress documents, allowing you to vanquish the terrifying bad file format errors number 70, 39, and 108. Even better, you can also verify existing documents, so you’ll instantly know whether the integrity of your document is shady or unstable.

If you are quick on your feet, you’ll want to first save a temporary copy of a document before saving the original document, so that in the event that something goes wrong during the save process, the temporary file is still available for recovery. If you are unlucky enough to experience a gravely corrupted file in which your data can’t be completely salvaged, MarkzTools includes a scavenge text feature that provides you a way to extract text stories from your document file. Either way, you are looking at many measurable hours of work being saved.

When one of your documents becomes corrupted, MarkzTools provides a number of options you can try: First, you’ll want to try the convert or salvage functions (salvage bypasses complex data such as polygon runarounds, groups, or other objects that could be causing the trouble). If these functions don’t save you, you can also try setting the conversion options to plain text or gray preview because often the problem is rooted in corrupted text attributes, style sheets, or picture previews. If you still have no success, you still might be able to salvage most of the text stories by using MarkzTool’s  extract text feature.

MarkzTools has a simple and easy-to-use interface once loaded. You start by selecting the Markzware menu located in the main menu bar of QuarkXPress, then select the MarkzTools menu item. Select the verify document file menu item to check an existing file on disk.

Figure 1 Use the preferences to preset the options.

Preferences allow you to set up the XTensions module to meet your specific needs. If you select the checkbox to instruct MarkzTools to verify the integrity of the current layout of your project just prior to it being saved, then it will intuitively know that your original document file on disk should not be updated, serving as a type of document insurance. MarkzTools will first save your layout to a temp file. This allows the XTensions product to verify the temporary file and — if successful in this verification — replace your original file with the new one. MarkzTools can then thwart a catastrophe should the file integrity be compromised. You define where you want MarkzTools to place the temporary copy, and you can select to have it place it in the same folder as the original, or browse and locate where you want it saved.

Options for extracting text from a file include:

• Enter a value into the ignore count less than field to indentify when MarkzTools should skip finding small words (such as page numbers.)
• Click the next button to locate the next story.
• Click the previous button to go back to a prior story.
• Click the first button to start the scan from the beginning of the file.

Stories: Select stories to instruct MarkzTools to locate a text story. You should try using this method first.

[Block Read]: Select block read in order to locate raw ASCII data by going through each physical Block of the file. Use this as a last resort to locate text as it will often pick up garbage data that you will need to manually edit out.

Apply: When you have located a story you can select an insertion point in the current text box and then click the apply button to insert the text (as shown in the above diagram.)

All: Click the all button to locate and apply all text stories found.

Keep in mind that you can always type command-period to abort a long search or text extraction process.

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