- Ups and Downs of Online Publishing
- HTML and Web Browsers
- Exporting Your Content
- Web Documents and File Structure
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Exporting Your Content
If you’re reading this article, chances are that you want one of two things from QuarkXPress: either to export final web pages that look just like what you see in XPress, or to export your content (text and perhaps graphics) so you can use it in another web design program. XPress gives you some of the tools you want, but not all.
It comes down to page geometry. (Geometry is the part of the HTML code that says where something should be on a page.) The basic Export HTML feature (covered later in this article) exports your page with geometry, so that your final HTML looks almost exactly like what you see in XPress. There’s no way to export your whole document (text and graphics) without the accompanying geometry—a major oversight, in my opinion.
Save Text as HTML
You can, however, export a single text story as HTML without page geometry:
- Selecting the Content tool.
- Click in the story.
- Choose File > Save Text or press Command-Option-E (Windows: Ctrl-Alt-E).
- From here, you can select HTML from the Format pop-up menu. The result is a text file with HTML codes that you can import into another program.
The HTML created using Save Text is styled using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which are much fancier ways of styling text. While most web programs (Dreamweaver and so on) support CSS, some older programs don’t. I haven’t found any way to get simple, non-CSS tags out of XPress.
Use an XTension
Before version 5, everyone who wanted to export HTML from QuarkXPress used a commercial XTension such as Extensis BeyondPress or Gluon’s WebXPress. Many people still want to continue using these products because they let you do things that QuarkXPress can’t do by itself. For instance, both can export all your text and graphics from a regular XPress document, without reformatting it as a web document. More importantly, they can export all your stories and graphics as linear HTML, without page geometry.
Gluon’s WebXPress now works in QuarkXPress 7, and it offers a number of other cool features, such as XML, eBook format, and Palm HTML export. It also can create a web page with a Table of Contents page. This is a great XTension for converting your XPress documents because you don’t have to convert your file to a web layout first.