Planet Quark

I am often asked by students in my QuarkXPress class for some really great design tricks within QuarkXPress. Putting an image inside text is one of them. In this lesson I will teach you how to get an image to appear inside of your text.

The first step is to create a text box and type the text you want an image to appear inside of. Remember that an image is going to need a lot of room to actually show inside the text, so I would recommend picking a thicker font. If you are not sure what fonts you have, and you would like to preview the word you have written in all the fonts you have activated or installed on your machine, select the text, and use the shortcut of Option + F9 (Mac) or Control + F9 (Windows). This will cycle you through the fonts you have loaded on your machine. If you mistakenly pass a font you would like to use, add the Shift key to the shortcut to back up.

Using the shortcut to choose a different font.

Now that you have chosen the text you want, it is time to bring in the image. You cannot import the image into live text, however. Conundrum! What to do? You need to reduce the text to its outline form. In Quark this is accomplished using Style> Text To Box. When you choose this command it makes a copy of your text and converts it to outlines. You then have two copies of your text: one still an actual font in a text box, and the other a Bezier outline of the text. I recommend holding down Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) before activating Style> Text To Box. This will make the text into outline paths and leave it in the same place as it was in the text box. (Just as a side note, I do like to increase the tracking of the text before I do this, because it seems the text often grows slightly. If necessary, you can always undo Text to Box, adjust your tracking and apply again.

Using the Text To Box Feature.

Now that the text has been reduced to its outline form, select the outlines with the Item tool. Then choose Item> Import Picture and select whatever picture you want.

Importing an image into text.

And there you have it! Images inside of text inside of QuarkXPress!

(For more on this topic, see Convert Text to Outlines.)

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If you like to work with lots of page guides, sometimes they can overwhelm the page. Because many guides are only useful when you’re zoomed in, QuarkXPress lets you set individual guides so that they only appear at specific magnifications:

If you hold down the Shift key while pulling a guide from a ruler, the guide will only appear and be functional at a view percentage equal to or greater than the view percentage active when you create the guide.

So, if you want certain guides to only show up in 300% view or higher, then Shift-pull the guides from the ruler when you’re viewing the document at 300%.

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Adobe recently announced that they’re discontinuing their website design application GoLive. If you aren’t fond of Dreamweaver, have a look at SoftPress’s Freeway Express ($79) and Freeway Pro ($249).

These are truly excellent, time-tested WYSIWYG applications for creating websites. Aimed at experienced print designers, their page-layout interface closely mimics QuarkXPress — you’ll feel right at home, and Freeway handles all of the technical issues for you.

And this is no wimpy tool: Freeway supports CSS, and includes Google Actions, site templates, incorporating Google content, special effects, and more. Use it in combination with Quark Interactive Designer to create Flash-based Web banners, or simply use QuarkXPress to lay out page elements any way you like, and then export them in JPEG, GIF or PNG format.

If you want to try it out, SoftPress offers a free trial of Freeway, so you have nothing to lose — and you may discover that you actually LIKE creating Web graphics in QuarkXPress and laying out complete websites in Freeway!

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