QUARK TYPOGRAPHY Part I Part II Part III   FontSite Archives Main Page

QuarkXPress is exceptionally strong in terms of typographic control. You may not be aware of some of its features, but they’re ones that can greatly simplify your job. I want to share some of the more interesting features I’ve come to depend on for controlling type. The Apply Button In several of Quark’s dialog boxes you’ll find an Apply button. This button lets you preview changes you’ve made in the various dialog boxes without actually committing to them. For example, in the Paragraph Formats dialog box, there are several options for controlling indents, leading, hyphenation, etc. As you adjust these settings, you can click the Apply button to preview the effect they’ll have on selected type. But clicking Apply every time you make a change may be annoying enough to prevent you from using the feature. Ah, but get this: you can turn on the Apply button permanently by holding down the Option key (Mac), or Alt key (Windows), and clicking it. Any future changes you make are automatically applied to your text. The button will remain On until you turn it off (by the same means you turned it on), or until you quit the program. Option click (Mac) or Alt click (Win) the Apply button to permanently turn it ON. Right Margin Tabs Setting up a tab stop at the extreme right edge of the text box can be a bit tricky. You never quite know if you have it at the very edge of the box or not. You can enter it numerically, but there’s a simpler way to accomplish this task. When you’re inputting the text, instead of pressing the Tab key, press Option-Tab (Mac), or Alt-Tab (Win). When Quark sees one of these tabs, it automatically shoves the tab to the right edge of the text box. There are a couple of advantages to this. First you don’t have to manually set a tab stop. Quark uses the right edge of the text box for placement of the text. It’s like setting all type after the tab flush right. The second advantage is a big one. If you ever have to resize the text box, making it narrower or wider, you won’t have to re-position the tab stop. The type will simply re-flow to the new width of the text box. I’ve used this technique in a couple of situations. It’s great for setting financial information (e.g., annual reports) and restaurant menus. Take a look at the following sample. If I were to enlarge the type size, the first line would probably be too long. With a right-margin tab, I can simply adjust the width of the text box and the right tab adjusts accordingly. Indent Here command The Indent Here command is another one I use all the time. It’s perfect for bulleted lists, for instance. Indent Here works by placing an invisible character at a user-defined point on a line. The character becomes visible when the Show Invisibles option is turned on. The Indent Here command looks like a vertical dotted line (see the example below). When a line of type auto wraps to the next line, the second and subsequent lines indent at the same place where the Indent Here command was placed. The keyboard command for Indent Here is Cmd-Forward Slash (Mac), or Ctrl-Forward Slash (Win). The Indent Here will stay in effect until it encounters a hard return (Return key). After a hard return it will then place the next line at the normal left indent. You can type a soft return (Shift-Return) to force a new line yet still indent at the Indent Here command. Mars Attacks There’s an Easter Egg in Quark that most of you have probably seen by now, but for those who haven’t it might bring a chuckle. Select any item in Quark, text or picture, and with the Content tool selected (the second tool on the tool bar), type Cmd-Opt-Shift-K (Mac) or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-K (Win) and watch what happens. Doing so deletes the selected item, but you can Undo it right back. Come back next month for more controlling behavior featuring QuarkXPress.

EMSoftware Xstyle Download Xstyle Here

Xstyle from EM Software, Inc. is a QuarkXPress extension. It adds two palettes that brings a number of typographic controls to the desktop that would normally need dialog boxes to access. One allows you to create full functioning style sheets without having to open the Style Sheet dialog box. The other adds all the settings found in the Paragraph Formats dialog box and adds of few of its own. The Xstyle Editor takes all the settings from the Style Sheet dialog box and brings them to the desktop where you create and edit styles at any time.

		This Xstyle palette gives you control over paragraph formatting along with other useful type settings.