Planet Quark

In QuarkXPress 8, you can drag just about any kind of graphic or text file onto a page, from anywhere you can normally drag a file — the desktop, Adobe Bridge, Portfolio, iMedia Browser, etc. You can even drag text directly from inside a Word document onto a layout page, or even a selection of an image from inside Photoshop onto a page in QuarkXPress.

Now, I don’t recommend doing this in layouts destined for print, because dragging a selection from Photoshop creates an embedded, 72dpi picture in QuarkXPress. But it’s an interesting quick-and-dirty trick to know when you need to show a portion of a design to someone, or when you’re mocking up a Web page in the Web space in QuarkXPress.

If you want to drag that selection back to Photoshop, well, you can’t. Instead, here’s the trick: use the Picture Content tool (or double-click on the picture), copy it, and then switch to Photoshop, create a new document (which will have the exact dimensions as your copied picture), and then paste it in.

Also note: your selection in Photoshop must be rectangular for any of this to work. A non-rectangular selection dragged into QuarkXPress results in an empty picture box.