Planet Quark

Refuse To Enter Into Dialog

I first began using QuarkXPress as a sub-editor in 1989. This is not a badge of honor. It’s an excuse. You see, old habits die hard. In Terry Gilliam’s 1977 movie Jabberwocky, there’s a scene in which the hero Denis visits a medieval barrel-making factory, a deliberate anachronism intended to satirize the dehumanization of modern-day production [...]

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Arrange Items Across Layers — And Group Them

One very useful unique feature of QuarkXPress 7 is the ability to edit text in boxes that are obscured behind other boxes. There are times when it gets fiddly so I use a workaround which I’ll explain below — but I’m getting ahead of myself. First up, how do you select a text box that’s sitting [...]

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Duplicate and Align at the Same Time

I’m going to sing the praises of DragNCopy, a free XTension from Badia Software. What makes it so good isn’t the basic function (it duplicates items… gosh) but what you can do with keyboard modifiers and its built-in memory. What is DragNCopy? Well, in all Adobe design programs including InDesign, dragging on an object while holding [...]

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