I’ve been designing books lately. Usually a certain publisher’s books are a couple of hundred pages long, nearly all text and made as one file. Last week’s started in similar vein but when chapters 3 to 12 arrived, along came hundreds of graphics to extract from Excel, converted to Postscript in Illustrator before including in the book. This should have meant making the book in chapters, splitting each into its own file. These then orchestrated by the QuarkXPress book pallet, which sorts out the page numbers, starting positions for the first page (left or right) and so on. But by then it seemed too much effort. Bad choice!

Things went well until page 300 or so when chapter 10’s text flowed in. Calamity! QuarkXPress crashed, corrupting the file and refused to re-open it. The back-up copy, only a morning’s work behind, was opened and snooped around for indications as to what caused the crash.

Does anyone know how to use Word? This is the world’s most popular text processing package, although why is completely beyond my comprehension. For some reason the author had used multiple “languages” in their Word documents and as the text flowed in, the QuarkXPress file ended up having them all. Usually Word documents are still stuck in US settings, I don’t think I’ve ever found a British author who has changed this. As well as being full of tab-tab-tabbing or space-space-spacing to turn a line over, and return-return-returned to move to the next page. Worse still is leaving the amendments un-approved so that both the existing text and their suggested alterations are included in the book.

The other cause for the crash was a new one to us and took a while to solve. The author had set up style-sheets with similar names except for adding a digit so that “body text indented” became “body text indented 1″, “body text indented 2″, “body text indented 3″ and so on. As their text flowed into QuarkXPress these had been recognised except for the digit at the end so eventually there were 15 or so “body text” style-sheets. Trying to delete these crashed QuarkXPress. Another favourite problem solver half worked - saving the file as QuarkXPress version 6 and opening it in the old version of the program. The document was fine there, style-sheets deleted but on saving, it wouldn’t re-open in version 7.

Things looked bad, a week’s work up the spout unless a solution could be found. It was, simply by using the QuarkXPress Append function and selecting a body text style-sheet from another document to replace the “bad” ones. This deleted all the other unwanted ones at the same time and all was well. Needlesstosay, new documents were made for each chapter with the text and graphics, luckily made to run in-line with the text, cut and pasted into place.

Phew!