By: Erik Vlietinck
Sun, December 02, 2007 - 7:55:00

http://www.easypress.com
Score:

British EasyPress Technologies’ Atomik RoundTrip is an XML to QuarkXPress and vice versa conversion system. It allows you to import XML into QuarkXPress documents and export QuarkXPress documents into XML format. Atomik RoundTrip makes itself known to QuarkXPress 7 users as two palettes with a third that becomes visible when doing some more complex XML coding. We found Atomik RoundTrip to be both extremely powerful and yet easy enough to understand relatively quickly. It is a must-have if you want to integrate QuarkXPress 7 with an existing XML-capable Content Management System, and it can even be more than that.

The environment is a small company that has an XML-capable CMS in place and which wants to exchange content and styling between its CMS and QuarkXPress 7. Perhaps the company wants to migrate its print documents to the Web, or perhaps it wants to get a permanent and semi-live link between the CMS and QuarkXPess 7.

Another environment has both InDesign CS2 or CS3 and QuarkXPress 7 in use. The company doesn’t want to force any of its users into learning and using another layout design system. It therefore needs a flexible conversion utility to convert from and to InDesign and QuarkXPress. They could buy Markzware Q2ID or ID2Q, but doing so won’t give them much flexibility in setting up each layout application’s templates.

Atomik RoundTrip can make a difference here. True, you will have to take a detour using XML --which is not the easiest technology on the planet-- but it will enable you a much higher degree of freedom and flexibility then with any other means of conversion. Atomik RoundTrip does not exist for InDesign CS3, but InDesign CS3 might just have the right XML capabilities from itself to enable RoundTrip to perform its magic.

XML Publishing

If all you need is one-way migration from InDesign to QuarkXPress 7, things become even easier, as there are EasyPress products that will do just that: export XML from InDesign. But we’re now going to focus on Atomik RoundTrip.

First of all, an observation that I made early in testing Atomik RoundTrip: XML may be hard, DTD Document Type Definition) may be Chinese to you, and a ruleset may not ring a bell, but Atomik RoundTrip by itself is child’s play to use. And if you need Atomik RoundTrip, the odds are that you will (must, even) have a good knowledge of XML.

What you do with Atomik RoundTrip is simply put import and export XML content into and from QuarkXPress 7 print layouts. I went through the EasyPress tutorials for Atomik RoundTrip and at the end I was convinced that you will have a hard time finding another application that is equally powerful and equally easy to use.

Atomik RoundTrip has two palettes: one for the document’s structure and another one to control Atomik RoundTrip’s functionality. Nw, the most simple of things is to open a document, open an XML file in Atomik RoundTrip and drag an XML snippet of text or an image to the document. You’re than importing XML into QuarkXPress.

The document will quickly be filled with content, but you’ll have to do it by dragging the XML content into the document. That’s not what Atomik RoundTrip is made for. So, the next step in complexity is to automate the whole system, and you do that by creating placeholders that are linked to XML content. The placeholders can be saved in a QuarkXPress 7 template, and the next time you open the template, you can literally pour in different content automatically --and all in the right places.

Simple Workflow System

Even if you were to change the location of the placeholders themselves, the content would still flow in the right places, as each placeholder is tied to an XML element --that’s one of those things that make Atomik RoundTrip so powerful and far more flexible than simple conversion tools.

Changing the content of the XML elements automatically updates that content in the QuarkXPress document --at least, if that is what you want. Even if the content is changed with a text editor, or more to the point: in a CMS.

The term “RoundTrip” in the application’s name comes from the fact that all this works both ways. Change content in QuarkXPress and when you set the system that it may apply these changes to the content in the CMS, it will do so. Atomik RoundTrip can even export XML from QuarkXPress without referencing the source XML files, because the XML files are embedded within the QuarkXPress document. Without exaggerating, this turns Atomik RoundTrip into a very basic, very simple workflow system. 

And indeed, based on the same technological foundations, EasyPress offers a competitor for K4, Smart Connection and QPS: Atomik Dynamic Publisher.

The simple import and export functionality in Atomik RoundTrip is of course not what users buy this for. For those simple export needs there is Atomik Xport Standard Edition. It’s the more complex feature set that appeals to cross-media publishers.

For example, you can create advanced rulesets with Atomik RoundTrip. Rulesets are instructions to style specific elements depending on the XML tag they carry. A paragraph tag can have a rule that instructs it to be styled with an existing QuarkXPress Paragraph Stylesheet, for example.

Rulesets can even be set up in such a way that multiple identically named elements nevertheless have the correct, different styles applied to them. For example, the title of an article often looks different from the title of a footnote. The XML element “Title”, however, may appear in two different places in the DTD --once in the main section of the document structure, and once in the footnote section of the structure. Atomik RoundTrip rulesets can discern between the two and style them appropriately.

Now, these more complicated attribute-dependent and contextual rules are not as easy to set up as the more simple rules, but the Ruleset creation palette nevertheless offers enough assistance to most XML-savvy users. It can become even more complicated with tables. Atomik RoundTrip is capable of generating tabular content --filling the right cells with the corresponding data. This works with actual tables, but also with “fake” tables (those that are created by tabbing).