QuarkXPress For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Media and software compilation copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957973
ISBN: 978-1-119-28598-4
ISBN 978-1-119-28599-1 (ebk); ISBN ePDF 978-1-119-28600-4 (ebk)
At the height of its worldwide popularity, QuarkXPress had almost 4 million users. That proved too tempting a plum for the competing Adobe juggernaut not to pluck from the desktop publishing pie, so over the course of 10 years, Adobe was able to draw many graphic designers to InDesign by providing it for free in bundles with Photoshop and Illustrator. Meanwhile, Quark underwent a complete metamorphosis, changing ownership and management to become the company that created this jewel of digital publishing: QuarkXPress 2016.
Meanwhile, the publishing industry itself experienced major changes, embracing multiple ever-changing digital formats — and QuarkXPress evolved along with these changes. QuarkXPress 2016 is not your father’s, mother’s, or grandparents’ QuarkXPress: Although the program has maintained its trademark efficiency and focus on the day-to-day needs of real-world publishers, it has also become a multifunction, platform-agnostic publishing engine capable of efficiently producing documents for any medium today — or that may present itself in the future.
Many graphic designers lost track of QuarkXPress, and they wonder what kind of organizations have continued to use it year after year. The simple answer is this: companies that value time and efficiency over bells and whistles. Financial organizations, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing industries, newspapers and magazines, book publishers, multilingual publishers, and especially East Asian publishers all rely on QuarkXPress because it saves them time.
QuarkXPress is happily experiencing a resurgence of interest from publishers and graphic designers, partly because it remains efficient, practical, and elegant, but also because it combines the features of several competing programs. You can use it for most tasks that publishers habitually use Adobe Illustrator for — but with a more efficient interface. (In fact, if you preferred Aldus FreeHand’s efficient, task-based interface over Illustrator’s byzantine tool-based interface, you might find yourself using QuarkXPress as if it were FreeHand!)
Another reason is cost: QuarkXPress is still sold with a perpetual license — there are no monthly fees to use it, and its year-over-year cost is significantly lower than Adobe’s InDesign or Creative Cloud suite. And now it can convert PDF, Illustrator, EPS, InDesign, and Microsoft Office content into native QuarkXPress items — a first in the industry.
I’m proud to have been asked to contribute a book to this successful book series. But, don’t be fooled by the series title. If you are using or considering using QuarkXPress, you are far from being a dummy. This is world-class software that will efficiently and effectively support your creative work for years to come.
The purpose of QuarkXPress For Dummies is to clearly explain the fundamentals of how to use all the tools in QuarkXPress. Whether you’re new to QuarkXPress or upgrading to the latest version, you get answers to your real-world questions about how stuff works. If you’re looking for a comprehensive book on how to do absolutely everything in QuarkXPress inside out, backward and wearing heels, this is not it. That book doesn’t exist — and if it did, it would be three times the size of this one. This book was written to QuarkXPress 2016 and should be useful to anyone using QuarkXPress versions back to 8.
To help you absorb the concepts, this book uses the following conventions:
http://www.dummies.com
.The first assumption is that you’re familiar with Mac OS or Windows, because the book doesn’t provide any guidance in this regard. This book doesn’t discuss any platform-specific issues. You need to know how to work with your chosen platform before you begin working with this book.
As you read this book, you encounter icons in the margins that indicate material of special interest. Here’s what the icons mean:
The great Internet contains a couple of additional resources for readers of this book:
www.dummies.com
(search for QuarkXPress For Dummies Cheat Sheet).www.dummies.com
.This book isn’t linear — you can start almost anywhere if you already understand the basics of how QuarkXPress works. However, if you’re new to QuarkXPress, Chapters 1 and 2 familiarize you with its overall purpose and interface. Chapters 3 and 4 explain how to create Items and work with them. Chapter 5 explains how to use master pages to ensure uniformity across multiple pages. QuarkXPress has a unique approach to sharing content across pages, layouts, and even multiple users, and Chapter 7 explains that. Most users spend 80 percent of their time in QuarkXPress working with text, so Chapters 8 through 11 dive deeply into the realm of text. Tables, pictures, and colors are explained in Chapters 12 through 15. Printing gets its own chapter (16), followed by a deep immersion into all the ways you can enhance and export your projects for digital media such as PDF and e-books. As you complete different kinds of projects in QuarkXPress, you may think: “There has to be an easier/better way!” so Chapter 18 points you to additional resources for help with specific topics. And finally, Chapter 19 attempts to smooth your QuarkXPress path with ten do’s and don’ts that are easy to forget but powerful if you remember them.
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Understanding QuarkXPress
What’s new in QuarkXPress 2016
Getting to know the interface
Creating and working with boxes, lines and text paths
Converting InDesign, Illustrator, PDF, and Microsoft Office files to native QuarkXPress items
Building a layout, a project, and a book
Syncing and collaborating with the sharing features
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting acquainted with QuarkXPress
Finding out what’s new in QuarkXPress 2016
Catching up with recent versions’ enhancements
Knowing how to manage your files from the get-go
Opening, creating, and saving files
QuarkXPress 2016 is not your daddy’s QuarkXPress. It may not even be your QuarkXPress if you haven’t used it since version 7. QuarkXPress has evolved far past its spectacular first incarnation as the world’s greatest tool for laying out pages for print. Adobe may have infiltrated the desktops of graphic designers by giving away InDesign, but QuarkXPress is still the industry’s most efficient engine for producing documents for multiple media. It’s currently in use by more than a million customers worldwide, especially in markets that value efficiency, such as manufacturing, financial, real estate, and pharmaceuticals, as well as book publishers, magazines, newspapers, and a wide variety of retailers and smart graphic designers.
In this chapter, I give you a brief overview of some QuarkXPress fundamentals and bring you up to speed on the new features in QuarkXPress 2016 as well as the major enhancements added to recent versions. Also, I provide some real-world advice for creating, naming, and organizing your files, opening older QuarkXPress documents, and saving your QuarkXPress 2016 document so that it can be read by QuarkXPress 2015. And finally, I point you to a hidden feature that saves backup copies of your files.
QuarkXPress is a page layout program. To build a page, you draw a few boxes (containers) and fill them with content (text, pictures, and other stuff). Add a few rules (lines) and frames (picture edges) and you have a layout. If you’re clever, you link your page to a master page (which holds items such as page numbers and headers that repeat on multiple pages) and organize your page items on layers (to cluster related items together for viewing or printing).
Over the years, QuarkXPress has evolved to support the needs of publishers and designers with major new capabilities such as interactive and animated items, Bézier (pen) tools that rival Adobe Illustrator, real-time collaboration with others working on the same document, creating e-books and even mobile apps, supplying powerful table-creation tools, converting content from other programs into native QuarkXPress items, creating anchored callouts, and providing support for dozens of languages in the same document.
In case the built-in features aren’t enough for you, you can buy and add third-party XTensions to QuarkXPress, which are plug-ins that add new capabilities ranging from one feature to an entire automated database publishing system.
The biggest new feature in QuarkXPress 2016 is the capability to convert imported PDF, EPS, and Adobe Illustrator files to native, editable QuarkXPress objects. You can even convert objects or entire pages from Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Office (including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), CorelDRAW, Affinity Designer, and other apps.
The program sports many other new features as well. You can export any QuarkXPress layout as an HTML5 publication, enabling you to create an app-like experience in a web browser or mobile device — complete with interactive objects and all the typographic control in QuarkXPress. You can create multicolor blends (gradients), each color with its own level of opacity. The new Fit Box to Text feature resizes a text box so that if your text is shorter than the box, or if it overflows the box, the box resizes to fit the text. This feature even balances text in boxes that have multiple columns of text. The new Color Picker (formerly only available as an XTension) lets you click any item (including imported pictures) to add new color swatches to your layout. You can access Stylistic Sets included in advanced OpenType fonts. You can enlarge the icons and labels on the Measurements palette by 50 percent.
QuarkXPress 2016 also offers improvements to existing features. In previous versions of QuarkXPress, for example, dynamic guides appear as you drag an item to show you its spacing in relationship to other items. This feature lets you easily align and uniformly space items. In QuarkXPress 2016, guides now appear that show when the edges and centers of text columns and gutters align with other items in multicolumn text boxes. The Find/Change feature now remembers your most recent searches; also, it allows you to search for and change nonbreaking spaces and characters. Content variables can now wrap onto multiple lines just as regular text does, which is useful for longer headers and for created/modified/printed slugs. Print experts will appreciate full support for ICCv4 color profiles. And the QuarkCacheCleaner app now deletes the QuarkXPress Preferences file as well as the font and picture cache files used by QuarkXPress.
Windows users will be happy to have the modern, efficient user interface that Mac users have enjoyed in previous releases. And if you use a Mac, you can now pinch, zoom, and rotate items using gestures on your Mac’s touchpad.
Installing QuarkXPress 2016 on a Mac is now blissfully easy: Just drag it into your Mac’s Applications folder. In contrast to previous versions, which required XTensions to be rewritten for each new version of QuarkXPress, XTensions written for QuarkXPress 2015 also work with QuarkXPress 2016 (as long as the XTension doesn’t conflict with a new function). And as opposed to Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress doesn’t require payment of an ongoing subscription — its perpetual license lets you use the program forever.
If you forget which features are new, choose Help ⇒ What’s New to be taken to Quark’s website to find an explanation of the new features.
If you skipped a release or three, you’re not alone — but you’ve missed some efficiency-enhancing improvements. Conveniently, Quark has provided a chart of new features that stretches back to version 7 and has allowed me to include it in the appendix of this book. Here are some of the most exciting and useful new features introduced since version 7:
If you haven’t used a page layout program before, you soon discover that managing files for QuarkXPress projects is a bit different from how you may have managed them with other kinds of programs. For example, QuarkXPress changes its file format with every version, so older versions can’t open projects saved by newer versions. Also, a QuarkXPress project usually has several parts and pieces that are best stored together in a folder. You learn about these important topics next.
QuarkXPress 2016 can directly open documents that were last saved by QuarkXPress 7 and higher; documents earlier than version 7 require conversion first, as explained in the next paragraph. You can also copy entire pages from Adobe InDesign or Illustrator as well as import pages from PDF files, and convert them to native QuarkXPress items. See Chapter 3 for more on importing and converting those files.
Opening an existing project in QuarkXPress is no different from opening a file in any other application: From within QuarkXPress, choose File ⇒ Open and navigate to the file. But QuarkXPress also has a handy Welcome screen (see Figure 1-1) that appears when no project is open, or when you choose Window ⇒ Welcome Screen.
FIGURE 1-1: The Welcome screen.
The Welcome screen has three sections:
QuarkXPress 2016 can open documents last saved by QuarkXPress 7 and higher. (Version 7 is when Quark dramatically modernized the document format.) To open QuarkXPress documents last saved by versions 3.1–6, first convert them with the free QuarkXPress Document Converter, available at Quark’s website. (The easiest way to find it is to type QuarkXPress Document Converter in your web browser’s search field.)
In contrast to most other programs, QuarkXPress documents often rely on external files that have been imported and linked. For example, when you import a picture, QuarkXPress inserts a preview of the picture on your page and remembers where the original picture file is. It then grabs that picture file whenever you export or print the QuarkXPress document. This feature can be tremendously handy for at least two reasons. First, picture files can be enormous, so by not including them inside your QuarkXPress document, your document doesn’t balloon to an unworkable file size. Equally important, if you edit the picture file after importing it into a QuarkXPress page, the updated version of the picture is used when printing or exporting the document.
Therefore, before you create a new QuarkXPress project, it’s smart to create a new project folder to hold it. A handy naming convention for the folder might be as follows: client name-project name-year-month, which would look like this:
petstumes-2017 catalog-16-11
You can then create a folder inside that folder for linked pictures, which keeps them handy for your project. You may also want to create a folder for files related to the project, such as the original word processing files given to you, notes about the project, and other files related to your project but that aren’t necessary for printing it.
Back in QuarkXPress 7, Quark changed the way files are structured. Previously, QuarkXPress documents were similar to those by other applications: Each document had one page size and orientation. But in QuarkXPress 7 and beyond, you no longer have “documents.” Instead, QuarkXPress creates what it calls a project that can include multiple layouts. (You can think of a layout as what was previously a document.)
Each layout can be a different size and orientation (portrait or landscape), so you can keep different parts of a project or campaign together. For example, a client’s business card, letterhead, and envelope can each be a layout within the same project. Or, for another example, a restaurant’s menu, table tents, happy-hour specials, and signage can each be a layout within one project.
A QuarkXPress project can contain two types of layouts: print and digital. This allows you to use one project to create content for various media — such as print, PDF, ePub, native apps, Kindle books, and HTML5 publications.
By grouping them together like this, QuarkXPress also lets you share content among these layouts. For example, the colors and fonts can be consistent across those layouts, and you can even use QuarkXPress’s Synchronization features to ensure that if you change, say, an address or phone number on one layout, that address or phone number changes on all of them. (See Chapter 7 for more on synchronization.)
Because of this fantastic capability, every project has at least one layout. Each layout has its own name (similar to how documents in other applications have their own names), and you can add new layouts to the open project by choosing Layout ⇒ New.
To create a new project, follow these steps:
Click Project in the Create panel of the Welcome screen that appears when no projects are open, or choose File ⇒ New ⇒ Project.
Either way, the dialog box shown in Figure 1-2 appears.
Enter a name for your layout in the Layout Name field.
As explained previously, a project can have multiple layouts, and each layout can have a different name. At the moment, you’re entering a name for the first layout in your project.
In the Layout Type drop-down menu, select the type of layout you want.
If you intend to print the layout you design, choose Print. If you intend your layout to be viewed onscreen, perhaps as a fixed-layout e-book or reflowing e-book, an HTML5 publication, or an app, choose Digital. (If in doubt, choose Print — you can always convert it to Digital later, as explained in Chapter 17.)
Select the Single Layout Mode check box if you think you won’t be adding any further layouts to this project.
Selecting this check box hides the layout’s name (Layout 1) from the project, which simplifies filenames if you export your layout as a PDF or other digital document. As you learn in Chapter 17, when you export your layout to PDF or other formats, the new file is named Project_Layout, using the project and layout names you assigned to them. (The project name is the same as the name of your file when you save it.) When in Single Layout Mode, the name of the exported file is simply the project name, which is the name of the QuarkXPress file on your computer.
If you find yourself creating projects with just one layout most of the time, you can change QuarkXPress’s Preferences so that every new project has Single Layout Mode enabled by default. To do that, first close all QuarkXPress projects. Then, choose Preferences from either the QuarkXPress menu (Mac) or the Edit menu (Windows). In the Preferences dialog, scroll down to Project and click General. Select the Single Layout Mode check box. After that, every time you create a new project, the dialog box will already have the Single Layout Mode check box selected for you. To create a multi-layout project, just deselect that check box and a field will appear for you to name your first layout in the project.
In the Page box, type a width and height for your layout or choose a preset size from the Size pop-up menu.
You can save your own preset page sizes. To do that, choose New from the Size pop-up menu, and in the resulting dialog box, enter the dimensions of the page size that you want to save and give your preset page size a name, such as Postcard-6x4.
In the Page Count field, enter how many pages you think you’ll need.
Don’t worry: You can add and remove pages later.
If your layout will have left and right pages (as in a magazine), select the Facing Pages check box.
This setting enables you to have different margins and Master Pages for the left- and right-facing pages. If you know that your layout will require having odd page numbers (1, 3, 5, and so on) on the left-facing pages, select the Allow Odd Pages on Left check box. Normally, you keep this unselected.
If you want QuarkXPress to be able to add new pages automatically as your text grows (for example, in a long document), select the Automatic Text Box check box.
This setting places a text box within the margins of the Master pages and applies that text box to every page based on that Master page. (You can learn all about Master pages in Chapter 5.)
Set the Margin Guides as needed.
These special guides indicate the “live” area of your layout, where your main content will be (text, pictures, and so forth). Items such as your page numbers, headers, and footers will normally be in the Margin area, so be sure to leave room for them if you plan to use them.
If your layout will have several columns, enter the number of columns in the Columns field under Column Guides.
The Gutter Width field determines the space between the columns. QuarkXPress then does the math for you and places guides within the Margins on each page, as necessary for the number of columns and gutter width you entered. If you enabled the Automatic Text Box check box (see Step 9), the text box will have these columns as well; otherwise you need to set the number of columns for each text box manually.
FIGURE 1-2: The New Project dialog box.
To close an open project, choose File ⇒ Close Window or click the red button in the title bar of its window. If you’ve made changes to the project, or it hasn’t yet been saved, the Save dialog box opens. In the Save As field, enter a name for your file along with a location to save it, and click Save to save and close your project.
Conversely, if you know you haven’t yet saved your project and want to continue working on it, you can choose File ⇒ Save to open the Save dialog box. Give your project a name, choose a location in which to store it, and click Save. Your project remains open, yet it’s safely saved on your computer.
If you’re paranoid, or simply don’t trust yourself to save your projects often enough as you work on them, you can enable QuarkXPress’s Auto Save, or the Auto Backup feature, or both.
When you enable Auto Save, it automatically saves a temporary copy of your project in the background as you work, at whatever time interval you set in Preferences. If your computer crashes, QuarkXPress offers to open the automatically saved version the next time you open your project.
Auto Backup creates a new copy of your project every time you save it and keeps each of the previous copies you’ve saved (up to the number you enter in Preferences). If you decide that your recent changes to a project are awful, you can close it and open one of the previously saved versions, which are stored either in the same folder as your project or in a different folder that you specify in Preferences. To enable these features and adjust their settings, choose QuarkXPress ⇒ Preferences (Mac) or Edit ⇒ Preferences (Windows). In the Application area of the Preferences dialog box, click Open and Save. Choose the Auto Save and Auto Backup settings you prefer and click OK.
In any case, even if you don’t enable Auto Save or Auto Backup, QuarkXPress 2016 silently saves a backup of your last ten opened documents. You find them in the Quark_Backup folder that QuarkXPress creates for you in the Documents folder on your hard drive.
If you find yourself creating a similar document repeatedly, you may be tempted to duplicate it and replace its content. Instead, consider saving it as a template. A template is simply a QuarkXPress document that duplicates itself before opening into QuarkXPress as a new document. To save a document as a template, choose File ⇒ Save As, and in the Save As dialog box, go to the Type drop-down menu and choose Project Template.
To use the template, choose File ⇒ Open and navigate to it on your computer. When you open the template, QuarkXPress 2016 creates a new project from the template file. After making your changes, you can then save it with any name and be confident that you haven’t replaced the original.
Chapter 2
IN THIS CHAPTER
Using the Application interface versus the Project interface
Understanding the purpose of each menu
Discovering the value of context menus
Working with palettes
Using View Sets for different tasks
Previewing your work
Zooming and panning
Moving between layouts
Smart designers and publishers value QuarkXPress for its efficiency. Before each revision of the program, Quark’s design team watches how users perform tasks, and the team comes up with clever ways to reduce the number of mouse clicks required to accomplish those tasks. But still, the first time you launch QuarkXPress, you may think that you’re staring at the cockpit of a commercial jet. Not to worry! The layout is logical, and after you read this chapter, you’ll be pointing and clicking without even thinking about it.
The most important idea to understand is that some interface items relate to only the current layout you’re working on; others relate to QuarkXPress itself; and still others change depending on the active item on your page. For example, if you have multiple layouts open, the layout controls attached to the project window let you view each layout at a different view percentage, with different ruler measurements and (optionally) split windows. In contrast, the free-floating palettes don’t change as you switch among projects and layouts. And amazingly, although the menu bar at the top of your display hosts menu items that can affect anything in QuarkXPress, those menu items change depending on what kind of page item is active.
In this chapter, I take you through an overview of each of the QuarkXPress menus so that you know the purpose of each one. But first I tell you a little about the Application and Project interfaces. Later, you see how to do everything you need to do with palettes, how to navigate your layout by zooming and scrolling, and how to switch around among your various layouts.