If we didn't use pre-defined Quark style sheets (or InDesign style sheets) for this work we'd be in real trouble. The text in these books has to be set up consistently throughout the series. Usually we put together a series of six (or so) books, varying in length from 32 to 64 pages. Our studio works on a lot of book design and page makeup for large publishing firms. This is where Quark style sheets come in handy. It would be much better to be able to change all instances of a heading, caption or other text syle, all at the single click of a mouse. And it's also an unreliable way to work - things can be easily missed or overlooked. It takes ages to trawl through large documents changing the attributes for each bit of text. If you've ever had to format large amounts of text in Quark XPress and then had to change the font, colour, character size or leading of all of the headings or body text, you'll know how time consuming it can be. David Blatner is the author of the books The QuarkXPress 4 Book (Peachpit Press, 1998) and Real World Photoshop 5 (Peachpit Press, 1999) and the video QuarkXPress 4 Tips & Tricks (Learnkey, 1998).How to Create and Apply Quark Style Sheets Using Quark Style Sheets ( click here for InDesign Style Sheets) But until you find the time to explore, these suggestions will help you speed up your production effortsa d maybe even enjoy your work just a little bit more. The best way to become really efficient in QuarkXPress 4 is to keep your eyes open and spend some time playing around with the program. (This feature is a boon to anyone using run-in heads in their documents, because it’s so much faster than applying the character styles manually.) That means, for example, that you can search for all the 11-point Helvetica text in your document and “replace” the attributes with a character-level style sheet. Similarly, one of the coolest new features in the Find/Change palette is easy to overlook: if you turn on Ignore Attributes, you can search and replace style sheets. Just press command-M, switch to the Text tab of the Modify dialog box, and change the Text Angle setting. For example, the ability to rotate a picture in a picture box is nothing new, but XPress 4 also lets you rotate text in a text box. Sometimes we look at a dialog box and don’t even notice the new features staring back at us. A clunkier but faster option is to use command-option-shift-M (to jump to the Font field of the Measurements palette), press tab (to switch to the Size field), type the size, and press enter.Īnd the infamous Martian still makes an appearance when you delete an object with command-option-shift-K, but in version 4 the same key combination occasionally releases a guy from Neptune, too. Now it opens the Character Attributes dialog box and highlights the Size field, which can be a much slower process when you have more than 20 or 30 fonts loaded. ![]() For example, command-shift-backslash () used to open the Font Size dialog box. ![]() When you see such artifacts in version 4, you can force XPress to redraw the screen by pressing command-option-period (.).Ĭonfusingly, while version 4 retains all of version 3’s keyboard shortcuts, some of them now work slightly differently. ![]() ![]()
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