Quark and Unicode

DadaKopf

I'm making a thingy for print and want to shove in a few nice ornaments and may need to use ligatures.

I'm doing it on PC in Quark 5, using OpenType Minion Pro (and ATM Deluxe 4.1) but it looks as if Quark doesn't support it.

Switching to InDesign isn't an option. Is there anything I can do?

Yoda

You're out of luck getting fancy OT in Quark, though I am not sure whether the difficulty you are having has to do with Unicode per se. If I had to use the ornaments I would make a fake substitution font out of them and paste them in out of that.

DadaKopf

Um, how do you make 'fake substitution fonts'? In Fontographer or something?

I think I figured out what the problem is - it's not Unicode exactly, it's that Quark v1-5 can only handle 256 characters. MS Word and InDesign handles them fine. InDesign isn't an option for me.

I'm not sure I need to use the ornaments right now, although I'd like to. Advice on how to make a foolproof substitution font would be greatly appreciated!

Yoda

Yes, I would do it in Fog. Put the glyphs into ordinary ASCII positions and use it as a dingbat font.

Quark 4 Passport and Quark 6 Passport have some limited WorldScript capability. I was talking with someone from Apple today who says that he heard that Quark 6.5 is going to be out "soon" and that he heard that Quark 7 will have Unicode support. THIS IS AN UNSUBSTANTIATED RUMOUR.

DadaKopf

Just another reason for the world to switch to InDesign!

Yoda

Apparently that's why Quark is making the changes. I guess their market share isn't what it was.

I don't come from the "design school" school of typesetting. I didn't come to typesetting after being trained for years in Photoshop and Illustrator. I've used InDesign for three books now. The first was Eachtraí Eilíse i dTír na nIontas (Coisceim & Evertype 2003) (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Irish) and the reason I used InDesign was because I thought I'd better test the waters since Quark might be moribund. There was a lot I found frustrating and irritating about InDesign. Not least: where is Command-J to bring up a page number box for navigation-without-a-mouse? Flowing pages was a pain. It was troublesome. But the end product was marvellous, if I say so myself. This year we're preparing Lastall den Scathán agus a bhFuair Eilís Ann Roimpi (Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There) and of course I'm using the same template since all the styles are the same.

The third book is one I'm working on now: a trilingual book of poetry, with Chinese on the left-hand page and English and Irish translations on the right. It has been surprisingly trouble-free, though still not as friendly as Quark. I strongly suspect that InDesign isn't really intended for long books.

I don't have InDesign CS yet but it's irritating that InDesign 2.0.2 doesn't allow keyboard input of Unicode text.

If Quark can get Unicode working, I'll be very happy.

DadaKopf

Actually, this is something I've been thinking about. I'm not actually a designer, I'm a spoofer. But I reckon I've made some OK stuff in the past. I'm actually doing my thesis in a completely non-design related subject right now. Call me superficial, but I want my thesis to look hot as well as get me a first on content alone.

I want to tweak the basic format of the thesis (Times New Roman, 12 pt, 11pt for quotes etc.) to make it look cooler. I'm probably going to settle either on Minion Pro, Century, or ITC New Baskerville for the body font, but the kerning in MS Word is HORRIBLE! More like kern-lessness!

So anyway, I've been thinking about laying it out in either Quark or InDesign to sort that trouble out. Also, I'll probably need to use some diagrams and I'd much rather do up nice EPS's of those than to use clunky Quark or MS Word tools.

I suspect, though, that this will be a major problem, especially with time constraints. The biggest problem is I know next to nothing about how to do this - I'm used to laying out newspapers and magazines, and some simple short-run posters/flyers but not a 100 page job like this.

Are there any good tutorials on line in both Quark and InDesign that makes this simple? Particularly: what's the deal with MS Word plugins?

By the way, the design project I was on about in the first post isn't my thesis, that's a different thing altogether, it's a magazine.

Yoda

You can't use Word for typesetting. Quark will import your nice EPSs just fine, into picture boxes. I can't point you to online tutorials; I learned Quark 15 years ago.

DadaKopf

What I meant was: type out my thesis in MS Word then paste/import it into Quark/Indesign to produce one flowing document in the hope that they can handle the kerning of PS/OT fonts better than poxy TT-biased Word.

Doable?

Yoda

Certainly. That's how I typeset books. Authors wordprocess, I pour into Quark and away we go.

DadaKopf

Does it keep the formatting and all? Do I just make loads of pages and link text boxes? Or do I open up a new 'project' or 'book', or what?

DadaKopf

I kind of sorted out my kerning problems when messing around briefly in InDesign. RTF pastes in fine, but unless I switch from Metrick to Optical kerning in the Character Palatte, it looks poxy. Now I'm having babies about how elegant my thesis is going to look when I'm finished.

Of course I have no idea what the difference between metric and optical kerning is, unless metrick is for traditional PostScript typefaces and optical is for OpenType.

Hopefully mu EPS's will look amazing too. I'll be doing up a 3D line drawing illustrating the structure of the international political economy!