Quark page deletion problem

[mark_owen]

Hi folks - I'm hoping there's some people here still using Quark 4 that can help me with a problem.

At the end of a project the Quark file for a book will generally be cut down in to manageable sections for our pre-press department and foreign studios, to make it easier for multiple people to work on the product, and for FTP transfer (documents up to about 80 pages will get broken down into ones of around 20).

The problem comes in cutting these files down. Usually it'll be done by duplicating the file, then deleting the extra pages in each section (safer than copying the pages across into a new document), but the resulting sections will all normally have a filesize the same as the original, and will take a ridiculously long time to open up in Quark again.

I'm guessing it's a problem with Quark not actually deleting the information from the file - it's still got all the data, but nowhere to display it - but is there a way of purging the info completely? I know I can fix it by copying all the pages to a fresh document, but that doesn't keep the complete set of style sheets for the document, and occasionally causes problems with background images on a spread changing order.

This is all on Quark 4.1/4.11 and Mac OS 10.3.4 - 10.3.9.

Anyone know of something that will fix it?

Cheers,

Mark

[beermonster]

hi mate

try doing a "save as" when you've deleted the pages not needed - dunno - it might work.

you could either save as with the same name and overwrite, or save as with a new name and see what happens

[mark_owen]

Nope - doesn't work, I'm afraid.

I've dragged the pages of a document which was previously cut up into a new file, and in the process reduced a 9-page section from 60.8Mb to 6.9Mb, and which now loads up pretty much instantaneously (as opposed to taking about 30 seconds to open previously).

[jimking]

Try a thumbnail drag. I'm in a bit of a rush now, can't explain it at this time, but maybe someone out there can.

[Pointyhat]

I don't think it's the copying of the doc pages he's having a problem with. It's having an 80 page doc and deleleting 60 pages, you will still have the 60 pages worth of text although hidden except for the text overflow marker. I'm not using Quark anymore, so now precisely sure if this'll work. What if you go into 25% view, highlight the text on the 20 pages, copy & cut. Then select all of whats left and delete, then paste the text you cut and reflow it. I don't think there's anyway to purge those extra pages of text but try this question at the Quark forums too, there may be an Xtension.
Also if this happens every time a project is finished is it viable to set up the projects this way, can you set it up in sections to begin with? or perhaps cut the word docs down to manageble sizes before you begin to layout?

[mark_owen]

It's not a case of cutting the text in the middle of the flow. Whenever a document is cropped it'll be at the end of a chapter/section so I only cut complete text streams. The problem is that this complete text stream - and, it would seem, all the image data - is still being stored in the file.

This morning, I needed to separate the first 33 pages of a 71-page document (text and greyscale images), but the resulting file is the same size (60.8Mb). This time, I even tried deleting the contents of every spread before deleting the pages, but it came up with the same result.

Opening up the file via Terminal (using 'more' to look at the raw data) I can actually see sections of text still embedded in the file.

The only thing that seems to bring the document down to a realistic size is splitting it up by dragging thumnbnails (as jimking suggested) and in this case resulted in a document sized at 17.5Mb.

The disadvantage of this method is that it only keeps the style sheets and master pages for the pages carried over, and neither are any items on the pasteboard carried kept (something which is occasionally useful when we have extra/alternative graphics that we want to pass to some of our translation studios, but can't send them the image file).

Incidentally, we have a standard page planner template that has text from a 15-year old book still hidden within it, so this is hardly a new bug!

[Joe]

Doing a google search I came up with this:

Go into your display preferences and change color tiffs to 8 bit and gray tiffs to 16 levels.

The easiest way to fix this is to simply do a Save As under the file menu. Simply saving the file isn?t enough, you need to Save As and give it a different name.

Re-open the doc and change your preferences back for the display.

Blank IT XT From Markzware (Free)
Blank It XT removes text and/or images from a document.

http://www.markzware.com/downloads/f...lank_IT_XT.hqx