Customer Reviews

AppleScripting QuarkXPress

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If you want to script quark then this is THE book to own. I hadn't done any scripting before and the literature from quark is pretty useless for beginners. This book has taken me in wonderfully easy and well explained steps, from a beginner to an extremely proficient user. For quark it is invaluable, and by working through it also helps you understand how applescript structures itself,making it much easier to learn how to script other applications. To put it in a nutshell, this book was for me what the discovery of making fire was to the cavemen.

I found this book to be an excellent source to Applescript in QuarkXPress. It gives tons of examples along with a CD. Without this book I wouldn't have been able to figure out the sentence structures in Script Editor for the goals I wanted to accomplish. Thanks Shirley!

It's a very helpful book with a CD full of script example in it.
Even comes with PDF version of the book. I fix my script right after checking for several pages in it. Mostly also works on QuarkXpress 8.

I've used QuarkXPress for 19 years, and Applescript for as long. I've never quit using either one, and I'm a voracious software student, so I've read and used every book on scripting Quark that I've been able to find over that time. And the bottom line is this: no one has yet come close to Shirley Hopkins's book in providing real world solutions and conceptual understanding.


Though the book offered here is more than 10 years old, there's very little that will not apply for users of recent versions of QuarkXPress. (Kudos to Quark for doing a darned good job of building a good scripting architecture and maintaining consistency over so many versions.)

Moreover, even though the focus is specific to QuarkXPress, I found the general Applescript section of the book to be so clear and succinct as to make many dedicated Applescript tomes seem inflated and unclear by comparison. It probably can't replace everything else available on Applescript, but if you are just starting out with Applescript, and you happen to have ANY version of QuarkXPress, you should not hesitate to shell out the high price on this very budget-produced book. It's a great example of a book not to be judged by its cover or copyright date.

[NOTE to users of QuarkXPress for Windows: this book is NOT for you. Sorry, but Applescript is only for Mac users. ]

If you need to automate layout tasks on your Mac with AppleScript and QuarkXPress, then this book will give you an excellent introduction into scripting Quark. It is also a good choice, when you are not yet familiar with AppleScript itself, because Mrs. Hopkins also explains the basic concepts of the automation language. The book also contains a CD with a lot of great sample scripts.

Hopkins' Applescripting QuarkXPress - It's really nice book including a lot of good examples. And I think there's no applescript book specially relating to quark. So I can tell this book is really cool choice to make script for quark. But it's not good for beginner. If you have experience in programming, you can refer applescript manual from web site with this book. You can do something like me.