Well, this is not the most thrilling evening. I have loads of chores to do, but it’s too late to start. Spent the whole evening on the Intenet. Looked at the Yahoo chat rooms and don’t like what’s going on there. I remember chat rooms from my days on AOL back in the early 90s. People at least seemed to talk about the subject of the chat room (or maybe that’s just my memory of it). Now, the whole thing is up for grabs. Anyone goes into any room and talks about anything. And irony reigns. I yearn for a more wholesome time.

One thing to remember: in Quark, to see the link symbol on the master page, you must have the guides visible (press F7). You can make a text box automatic by linking to that symbol even if you didn’t make an automatic text box when you first created the document.

Also, if you have a series of text boxes linked like that, when you paste a long piece of text into the first box, you don’t have to have enough pages waiting to hold all of it; Quark will create the needed pages.

Just figured out how I could put sequential automatic numbering on 500 tickets in Quark, printing 5 tickets per page.

Generating the list of numbers. In a blank Word document, generate a list of numbers by inserting an AUTONUM field (Insert - Field - Autonum). Then copy and paste it repeatedly (hold down Ctrl+V for a minute or so) until you have the 500 numbers. But these are codes, not editable text. So, select and copy the whole list. Make a new document, choose Edit - Paste Special, and paste as Unformatted Text. Do a search and replace to get rid of the periods that Word puts in the auto numbers.

Flowing the numbers into the ticket layout in Quark. On to Quark. On the master page, create an automatic text box to hold the numbers. Link it so that the link symbol in the top left corner of the page is unbroken. But since you’ll want to print more than one ticket on each page, make as many as you need on the master page and link the number boxes in a chain to the first box.

Now, make a new page of tickets using the master page. Paste the list of numbers into the first number box on the first page. The numbers flow from that box through to the boxes on the subsequent pages.

The finished ticket:

Yesterday I spent a lot of time with Apple Script. It is not as easy as they make you believe it will be, but then, it’s free! I was able to record a script that would open all the Quark files of one issue of Working Smarter so I could make them into PDFs, but then to change the script so that it could be used for the next issue, I wasn’t able to do. There’s no search and replace in Apple Script, for one thing. I tried cutting and pasting the script into Text Edit Plus, doing the search and replace there, then pasting the whole thing back into Script Editor. I kept getting error messages when I tried to run the script.

Today I rediscovered Netscape Composer. Netscape 7 is quite different from 4.75, and so is Composer 7. Though some things are frustrating, e.g., I can’t figure out how to change the fonts for the styles except through Preferences, the interface is pleasant, the results are predictable (of course it helps that I know a little bit more HTML than I did back when I tried Composer in 4.75), and best of all, it’s a WYSIWYG HTML editor that’s free! Nothing fancy, but it sure helps to be able to find out what’s happening with your tables by seeing their borders in Composer’s “Normal” view.

I took this dialect survey today; it asks you to tell how you would pronounce a word, or what term you would use for a certain phenomenon, such as what you call it when an auto accident on the highway slows down traffic not because it’s blocking lanes but because drivers are slowing down to view it. In Chicago, we call this a “gaper’s delay.” I don’t think that’s prevalent usage in most of the rest of the US.