Re: Scriptmaster XT work with Quark 4.11?
Re: Scriptmaster XT work with Quark 4.11?
- Subject: Re: Scriptmaster XT work with Quark 4.11?
- From: Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 08:54:12 +1000
On 10/8/01 2:59 AM +1000, Jenkins, David, email@hidden, wrote:
>
I was thinking about buying ScriptMaster XT. The demo on the www.jintek.com
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website is version 1.1, though on the ScriptMaster XT product page the
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version is listed as 1.2. It states there "Requires QuarkXPress 4.0 or
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later. Requires System 8.6 or later." Does anyone know if this will work
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with the latest QuarkXPress (4.11)? If so, is it worth getting? I tried
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writing the author a couple of times without success.
We regularly get people posting bits of QuarkXPress script here and asking
why they don't work, and the answer is often because they were written with
ScriptMaster. It adds its own commands, which don't work when it's not
installed.
My view is that you're better off without it, but that's only partly because
of the product itself (it still doesn't handle box names properly in version
4.1 and later, as far as I'm aware). In some apps -- Excel and BBEdit are
good examples -- recording snippets and editing them is useful and
educational. But in apps that have more complex object models, such as QXP,
you're more likely to get code that is at best inefficient and at worst
useless. The hard parts of scripting QXP -- the bugs and quirks -- just
don't get covered this way.
You'd do much better to look at lots of scripts (see www.macscripter.net).
Study the object model diagram in the documentation that comes with QXP (the
object model is well adhered to). Then post troublesome snippets where the
problems are not generated by ScriptMaster.
Just my opinion, of course...
--
Shane Stanley, email@hidden