Concatenated Holidays are used to automate the manual editing of holidays in the output file, in a manner almost independent of QuarkXPress, and most important, totally reproducible.

 

Concatenated holidays are used when you have diaries with a large number of holidays, many of which occur often on the same date, depending on the years, and the position of line endings is important for you. Concatenated Holidays let you combine together and manually edit these combinations of holidays, at design-time, to allow you to take into account the size and font of the textbox into which the holidays will be displayed.

 

There are 3 main aspects of Concatenated Holidays:

 

 

 

 

The screenshot below illustrates conditions under which concatenated holidays are useful. On the left is the output generated using [Fa] tokens, which give you some control over the way multiple holidays occurrences are displayed, but cannot include human judgement elements such as when to break a line or not, and when to separate 2 holidays by a "/" or a carriage return (to obtain the result on the right, for example). 

 

 

In cases where human judgement is necessary, one solution is to manually edit the output file. The problem with this solution is that this manual editing needs to be re-done everytime you re-generate a diary. There is also the risk of forgetting some or all of the manual editings, if you re-generate a diary in a rush at the last minute.

 

Using concatenated holidays, you still have to manually edit the collection of holidays, but you only do it once, because Q++ then saves it for re-use any time you re-generate a diary. It even saves it for the future years so that the editing done at the end or beginning of the years (Christmas and New Year, for example) can be re-used in next year's diary.

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Topic 164800 updated on 05-Jul-02 Topic URL: http://www.qppsupport.net/webhelp/index.html?formattedholidays.htm