Bryans Spiffy Impo

I haven't worked with applescript recently, but I did come up with one useful applescript. It produces imposed page layouts - if you work in prepress you would find this to be a time saver if you had no other imposition software available. Enter the page width and height, number across and down, gutter width, and job information, and the script will instruct Quark to build a page to those specs with trim marks, job slug, and (optional) color bar. The OS X version is an Applescript Studio application that works with Quark 6+, and an OS 9 version of the script is also available here that works with Quark 4/5.

Features:

Demo

None - just download, unstuff, and try it out. This is a screen shot:

Documentation

It may ask for the location of your copy of QuarkXpress. It will ask for the location of a color bar to place at the top of the page (if you work in prepress you know what I'm talking about), and it expects an EPS format file which will be ideally 1/4" high and the full width of the largest layout you expect to produce. If you cancel at that point, it won't have a chance to create the job slug, but I don't think it's a big deal, the important work is done.

The OS 9 version isn't so pretty, and may or may not work on your system. One common error it may report is something about not understanding the term 'group box' - through Quarks history, and OS 9's, and depending on the presence or absence of certain osaxen, some applescript terminology changes. Long story short, if you don't mind editing the script, changing occurences of the term 'group' to 'grouped' (or vice versa), may get the script going.

Download

OS X version for Quark 6+ 54K Stuffit file

OS 9 version for Quark 4/5 22K Stuffit file

changelog:

Related Projects

There are some applescript snippets in the Code Library, useful prepress oriented one-liners including 'Black to Rich Black' and 'Remove White Overprint' .