InDesign and QuarkXPress Typesetting Automation for Diary and Calendar Publishers |
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The Q++Studio diary and calendar typesetting automation software has been the choice of the world's foremost diary and calendar publishers, since 1999, to automate the typesetting of their diaries and calendars, reliably and efficiently, using the industry-standard QuarkXPress and InDesign file formats.
There are 3 main parts to Q++Studio: templates, data, and scripts (click on the image on the right to expand it).
| Templates | Q++Studio uses your own QuarkXPress or InDesign layouts as input and, from these, generates complete diaries and calendars as standard, fully editable, QuarkXPress or InDesign files*. |
These templates contain the formatting of the diary's elements (how the pages look), but are language and year independent, so that they may be re-used year after year.
All the most minute details of these diaries and calendars can be customized: font attributes, font background, framing and stroking, paragraph formats, tabulations, rules above/below, and textbox manipulations. Many of these features are combined into a feature specially designed for diary and calendar publishers, such as the minicalendar dates framing and background shading and the minicalendar paragraph formatting.
| Data | Q++Studio comes with full Unicode support, including native Arabic with cascading ligatures and one or multi-word kashidas, and Hebrew, and a sample database of translations which contains translations of the terms found in dated diary pages (i.e. Monday-Sunday, January-December, Week, etc...) for over 50 languages. |
| If there are terms missing from the supplied translations, or you need to use a language that is not in the sample database, then you can easily add your own translations and languages, or modify existing ones. |
| The Q++Studio sample database also includes the list of worldwide public holidays for all 195 countries of the world, as well as 48 other semi-autonomous territories, used by most of the main diary publishers of the world. Users can use these holidays "as is", or they can use Q++Studio to modify and expand this list (changing the names of some holidays, adding or removing some of the holidays, adding new countries, ...). This database is made up of rules (such as: Good Friday = 2 days before Easter) so, in principle, you can use the current database, and Q++Studio, to immediately calculate world holidays for the next 100 or 200 years. |
| However, in real life, the rules for celebrating holidays do change; some are added, some are removed, some are renamed, ... Therefore, the rules that are contained in this sample database are reviewed every day and a new updated version of this database is available for download at any time. This new sample database can then be imported into your system automatically. |
| Q++Studio also automatically calculates and inserts into diaries astronomical information such as sunrise/sunsets, moon phases, moonrise/moonset, equinoxes, solstices, zodiac signs, seasons, and most information that can be found in ephemeris. Our calculations are based on the DE406 numerical integration package of the NASA-JPL and agrees to within seconds with online resources such as the JPL or the USNO. |
| Scripts | Diaries are represented by scripts which is a set of rules that describes a diary as a selection of one or more Templates with various Data sets (languages, holidays, ...), as well as rules for the way the data is displayed within the templates (eg. holidays appear in red, special kerning for numbers from 10 to 19, ...). Once a script is built, it is easy to adapt it to another language or to change it to generate a diary for the following year. |
* The XV4 64-bit version of Q++Studio supports all QuarkXPress versions, from 8 to 2025, inclusively, as well as as InDesign versions 2020 to 2025, inclusively.
See also: network architecture.
Topic 144300, last updated on 24-Oct-2023
