Using CopyFlow Gold: CopyFlow Gold for QuarkXPress - Troubleshooting Import Problems

The good news is CopyFlow Gold (CFG) has been available and used productively with QuarkXPress ever since Quark 2.0. But even after all these years - there is occasionally trouble re-importing a .tag file - a bad tag in the file or a 'dirty' Quark doc are most often the problem, but here are the things to try and think about - in order.

1. Preferences:

The most reliable round-trip format to use is 'Single Tag File'. Your CopyFlow Gold preferences should be set to the defaults : esp. Box Types=Text Only & Inline Tags set on.

2. Encoding:

The character encoding preference should be the same as when the file was exported. Sometimes, especially when exporting to Unicode (UTF-16), an edit or translation tool somewhere in the workflow fails to preserve the encoding and rewrites the file in a single byte encoding before CFG is called upon to re-import. This often results in a 'blank' import. If this happens you can use a good text editor to determine the actual encoding of the text file and temporarily set the CFG preferences to this new encoding before import.

3. Quick Sanity Test:

With CopyFlow Gold do a quick batch export to a new empty folder followed by an immediate import of the .tag file you just created. If this works you know the problem is probably in the .tag file you are trying to import and not in the Quark document or your system.

4. Quark Versions:

Check Quark versions:

For QuarkXPress 7 you should be using at least 7.31
For Quark 8 you must be using at least 8.02.

If not, go to Quark.com and download a free upgrades.

5. Clean Quark document.

Try cleaning the Quark document by doing a Quark Save As... to a file of the same name - but in a new folder. Then re-try the import from the new Quark file.

6. Where The Import Fails:

If the Import is failing part way through the batch import process - reduce your Quark view to 40% and watch the import, concentrating on observing the last box selected at the time of failure. Restart Quark and with the CFGTool displayed click the last box you observed selected - its name will appear in the CFGTool. Then you can find that name in the .tag file and look for a broken tag.

In addition, the last piece of the tag file may remain in the import folder - named "boxname.xtg" for example 'box41.xtg' - this tells us the import failed on box41. You can disable the import of 'box41' by selecting the box named box41 and then using CopyFlow Gold's Name Box menu - to clear the name, click OK and save the Quark document. CFG only tries to import text imto named boxes.