Xpress tags grammar

[teamblimp]

Hello all,

The company I work for specializes in translating medical texts/references into their own markup language. We usually get the books from the publishers in either XML or quarkXpress Tags. The XML makes us smile. The quarkXpress does NOT. I have been looking for a good resource to explain the Xpress tag formatting with no luck at all. The only thing i found is a 3 page description of Xpress tags by David Blatner, which is informative enough, but not a complete description of the grammar that we need.

We have reverse engineered a lot, but we still don't know what certain things do, such as the 'x' before a character style sheet. e.g. what is the difference between <@tag1> and <x@tag1>?

any help would be appreciated,
blimp

 

[duncdude]

Hi Blimp

I have done quite extensive Quark document creation using Xpress Tags - in case you are interested using Perl to chomp through large ASCII files, make decisions based on content and also to clean-up data - then finally write Xpress Tags ready to be imported into Quark. Can you post some example Xpress Tag data that you have?


Kind Regards
Duncan

 

[MyFavoriteLetterIsB]

medXML?

hmmm, maybe that could be a new feature in Quark Xpress 7.0! or qeXML! What do you think duncdude and jimoblak

but seriously, I dont know of a source that has good documentation of tags. I only know enough to get done the simple stuff.

B

 

[teamblimp]

So we have made enough progress to write a program that outputs very simple html text extracted from Xpress tags.

We store the (@tag formatting (bold, underline, font, etc) in a class(we're using c++ to parse) and when we come apon a <$> tag, we revert back to that tag. If we come upon a <@tag> style tag, we change the formatting, but do not update the tag class. The '$' was the most confusing part. if you have a tag that says <f$>, that means revert to the font in the paragraph (@tag, but if you come across a tag that looks like <f$$> this means DO NOTHING. These tags can of course be combinded in many ways, most of which don't make much sense.
here is a rather confusing example:

@UTX-Drop Cap=<PKs100t0h100z60k0b0cKf"CaflischScript-Regular">
@OBJ=[S"","OBJ"]<*L*h"Standard"*kn0*kt0*ra0*rb0*d0*p(0,0,0,19,0,6,g,"U.S. English")Ps100t0h100z18k0b0cKf"Charcoal">
@OBJ:<x@UTX-Drop Cap><z24c"A [90c 100m]_UT 1,7,13"f"CaflischScript-Bold"><\c><$z$c$f$$>On completion of this chapter, the learner will be able to:


dunno how that will post, but here is a brief explanation.

the first is a character style sheet (<x@UTX-Drop Cap>). These are used to change the font (f"CaflischScript-Regular"), CAPS(K) and other attributes of the text. This is not stored at all and once it changes the text formatting, can be forgotten.

The second is a paragraph style sheet(@OBJ. These values need to be stored for further reference. Originally we were using the <$> to revert to either the character OR paragraph stylesheet, whichever was encountered last. The result was almost all of our text turning up in CAPS. The $ tells you to revert to the paragraph style sheet. a <$> as it's own tag will revert CAPS, underline, shadow, etc to the paragraph, where
<f$z$> will revert font and font size back to paragraph stylesheet.

we still have no idea what the 'x' character does in front of a stylesheet, such as <x@tag> vs. <@tag>. There definately is a difference, we just don't know what it is...

hope this helps, please post any questons/corrections that you know of.