Costing by the column-inch

[Mark Wilden]

A client would like us to be able to cost data according to its size when
formatted.

The layout is actually performed by Quark and XTags, but I'm thinking it
might be possible to emulate the Quark stylesheet in Word, create a Word
document by applying styles to the data, then obtain a column-inch
measurement from Word.

Does this sound feasible?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Sounds like a waste of your energy. Not familiar with Quark, but since it
does something very different from Word (page layout vs. word processing),
getting Word to replicate it would be a lot of work.

Perhaps try running some samples in Quark to come up with some guidelines
such as "x number of characters in 12pt will cost....in 14pt will cost..."
and tell the client it's an estimate, not a promise. Probably more accurate
than anything Word will give you. Alternatively, show the client sample
sizes--"here's 3 column inches, which holds x characters at 16pt, y
characters at 18pt".