DON’T DASH OFF

In QuarkXPress 6.X, if you added a discretionary hyphen (COMMAND + HYPHEN) at a point in a word, the word would hyphenate where you had inserted the hyphen (if necessary) and ignore any automatic hyphenation. If you placed a discretionary hyphen at the beginning of a word, it would break at that point (in essence, preventing a hyphen within the word itself). In QuarkXPress 7.X, Quark changed this behavior in an attempt to make it more flexible. After customer feedback, they’ve now changed it back to be more in keeping with the behavior style of QuarkXPress 6.X, but with the added flexibility of QuarkXPress 7 — namely word joiner. In QuarkXPress 8, a discretionary hyphen at the beginning of a word will simply kill hyphenation for that word (be it auto hyphenation or discretionary hyphens).

• A discretionary hyphen placed within the word will cancel auto hyphenation and break the word at the point of the discretionary hyphen.
• A discretionary hyphen placed at the beginning of a word will cancel both auto and discretionary hyphens within the word.
• To cancel an automatically inserted hyphen, insert a word joiner at the point of the undesired hyphen.

When you open a legacy document, it should not re-flow due to these discretionary-hyphen changes that have been made to each of the last versions of QuarkXPress. However, if you option + open an older document (in short, open the document and flow it using the new QuarkXPress 8 text flow), then any discretionary hyphen you inserted into the legacy text flow will adopt the new QuarkXPress 8 behavior and you might end up with unexpected line breaks. There’s a simple fix: Use the find/change feature to remove discretionary hyphens and enable QuarkXPress 8 handling (find \h and replace with nothing). When a discretionary hyphen is found, it will not be viewable on the screen since discretionary hyphens are a zero-width character, but you can find/change them anyway.

ZOOM IN

Many of the glyphs for invisibles characters have been enlarged for easier viewing on the document page. (You can now safely put away your reading glasses.)

LEARNING TO SPELL

If you are a current user of QuarkXPress, I’m sure that you have felt the frustration at some time in the past when the spell checker insisted on stopping to check every URL and email address. Since QuarkXPress 7.31 you have been able to set preferences for whether or not the spell checker will bother with such words. I include it here because I just discovered it, and figure others have not yet. It’s quite simple to change:

1. Choose QUARKXPRESS > PREFERENCES > SPELLCHECK.
2. Set the options.
3. Click OK.

If you’ve ever had to make a grid of pictures in QuarkXPress, perhaps to produce the “man on the street” section of a newspaper, you need to read this.

If you’re dragging in guides to align images, and then importing pictures one at a time through the File menu, you’re doing way too much work!

Even if you’re clever and use the Guide Manager in Quark 6 or 7, the new Guides palette or Grid Styles palette in Quark 8, or simply use Step and Repeat to accomplish this task, you’d still be working way too hard!  Let me show you how to work smarter…

As a continuation of my Scripts series, I’d like to show you how Dividing a Box can help.

Instead of the 6 different ways you could accomplish this task, let me propose to you a seventh…

Here is the task at hand: you need to make a grid of images that are aligned to each other. Instead of using any of the aforementioned tools and palettes, consider using a Script that has even been available since Quark 4! You’ll find it under Scripts> Grid> By a Dividing Box. (The Scripts menu is that scroll-looking icon at the right end of Quark’s items in the menu bar.)

To make a Grid, simply draw a box. This box is the box that will automatically be divided into rows and columns as the Script generates new boxes and guides in your Layout.

You can use either the Text Box Tool or the Picture Box Tool to create the box to be divide. The tool you use determines what kind of boxes will be generated. If you wanted to have multiple linked text boxes in a grid, this Script actually asks you if you would like to link boxes together at the end of the script. For this exercise, I would like to concentrate on Picture boxes. 

The first step is to create a box. In this exercise I will create a picture box to define the outside edges of the Grid of Picture Boxes that I want.

Draw a picture box.

Then choose Scripts> Grid> By Dividing a Box. The Script is launched.

The first question the Script asks is how many columns you would like. I chose 3.

The next question asked was how many columns I would like. I chose 3 again.

You can choose any number you’d like — they just need to be whole numbers (obviously!).

Chose your Column Gutter Measurement.

This is the space that will appear vertically between your picture boxes. It’s too bad there is no preview checkbox or apply in this window. Hopefully this will become a Menu command in Quark 9!

Chose your Row Gutter Measurement.

You may want to leave enough room to make your caption boxes. So think this one through. If it’s wrong, you can always delete these boxes and start over.

Chose whether you want Guides attached to the boxes.

Even though Quark is aligning these boxes perfectly for you, you may want to make guides just so it makes it that much easier to see if the boxes have moved, or if you need to align caption boxes later on.

And there it is: a Grid of perfectly aligned picture boxes ready for you to import pictures into. Now, if you have any version of Quark prior to Quark 8, unfortunately you will have to import each image separately.

But if you are one of the smart ones who has upgraded to QuarkXPress 8, I’d like to show the two easiest ways to import these images.

The first is using Adobe Bridge. If you have any professional application from the Adobe on your computer, you can use Adobe Bridge to navigate to the folder full of images you would like to place inside your newly formed picture boxes in QuarkXPress 8. The best part is that all you need to do is drag an image and drop it directly over an existing picture box in Quark to either fill the box, or replace an existing picture. You will see the picture box highlight in blue, so that you know which box you are dropping it into. And if fitting has already been applied to the box, that fitting will stay.

You may want to click in the upper right hand corner of Bridge and choose> Switch Bridge to Compact Mode. When in this mode Bridge becomes a palette floating over your Quark Project. You can drag and drop the images as needed.

Using Bridge to drag-and-drop images.

But, let’s say you don’t have Bridge. In QuarkXPress 8 you can now drag these images directly from a window on your desktop into your QuarkXPress project or into existing frames. (For further information on drag-and-drop in QuarkXPress 8, see this story at PlanetQuark.com)

To use drag-and-drop in earlier versions of QuarkXPress, download the free XTensions mentioned in this story at PlanetQuark.com. 

Choose your items visually using View> Show items as Icons in Mac OS X 10.5

Drag your images directly into Quark Picture boxes.

Once the items are dragged in they come in at 100%.

This is what the images look like dropped in at 100%.

You can instantly fit an image to its box in any of three ways: by pressing Command-Option-Shift-F, or by choosing Style> Scale Picture to Box, or by Control-clicking or right-clicking on the picture box and choosing Scale Picture to Box. Then you can Shift-drag the corner of the image to resize it within its box, while keeping its proportions correct.

Fit the image.

Once one image is fitted, you can drag and drop the rest into their boxes.

The final result. box.

The Scripts menu in Quark is full of very powerful features. Explore thy Scripts!

So why is Quark tackling enterprise publishing when other solutions already exist? That’s the question I put to Joshua Duhl, Quark’s Director of Enterprise Product Marketing. Oddly enough, his answer got me thinking about Apple. 

If Apple has a success model, it’s that they identify a market that’s being woefully underserved by clumsy and complicated products. Then they create a smarter and more elegant solution for that market (witness the success of the iPod, iPhone, iTunes, Mac OS X, etc.). 

Quark appears to be doing the same thing with enterprise publishing. Their strongest user base suffers under an unnecessarily complex and support-heavy mish-mash of products cobbled together to facilitate the relatively straightforward task of storing assets and publishing them to various media. Kinda like what Apple saw with digital music a few years back.

But Quark’s focus is on creating software that make it easy to publish pictures, text, layouts, and stories in newspapers, magazines, websites, Flash presentations, catalogs, directories, guide books, brochures, sell sheets, advertisements, (shall I go on?) — in multiple languages. So what if they automated some of the process and called it “Dynamic”? That’s right, Dynamic Enterprise Publishing. And hey — now that this label has three words, it can be an acronym: DEP. Ah, that’s better: DEP fits in alongside CMS, DAM and XML, which is much more comfortable for people who love acronyms. I am not one of those people.

I’m making light of all of this because many creative people I know hate acronyms and run screaming from terms such as Enterprise. But here’s the deal: Enterprise Publishing becomes really sexy when you add the word Dynamic to it. Seriously! As a designer, wouldn’t it be great if you could be assured that:

• The corporate image and branding that you worked so hard to create will be uniformly applied everywhere the company exists in visual form?
• The graphics and clever slogans developed to work seamlessly within one campaign will be used as intended, even within other, unforeseen campaigns?
• When you change a graphic, slogan, caption, name, location, or any other vital bit of information, that change ripples through all campaigns, everywhere, instantly?
• Your team was freed to engage in more creative projects, instead of babysitting and correcting projects mangled by those who just don’t “get it”?

Do I have your attention yet? I hope so, because that would mean that maybe I’ve done half as good a job introducing Quark’s Dynamic Enterprise Publishing direction as Joshua Duhl did in explaining to me. Joshua is Quark’s Director of Enterprise Product Marketing. In a recent interview, I asked Joshua about why he came to Quark, where he came from, and what direction Quark is taking with Dynamic Publishing.

Before joining Quark earlier this year, Joshua spent more than 20 years in the industry, with 10 of them as an analyst for International Data Corp. (IDC). While there, he wrote several seminal reports on market segments, including the first market analysis of Dynamic Enterprise Publishing. For further details, you can read Quark’s biography for Joshua below.

It’s clear that Joshua is an expert in the dynamic publishing market. As a result of his experience, he’s come up with a simple rule of thumb when evaluating enterprise publishing solutions:

• Does it solve the problem?
• Is it easy to use?
• Is it scalable?

He’s studied the main players for many years: Arbortext, Adobe, Quark, StreamServe, eXstream, and other XML authoring software packages. I think it says something important about Quark’s vision that when Joshua met with Ray Schiavone, Quark’s CEO, he came away excited enough to spearhead Quark’s direction in this area. Joshua said the meeting convinced him that only Quark has products that fulfill his three requirements.

The Quark Publishing System (QPS), with QuarkXPress as its user interface, fits the bill. Based on open standards (heck - it’s written in Java!), QPS can work within existing publishing workflows, taking advantage of existing content management systems (CMS) and digital asset management (DAM) systems. Its scalability extends from QuarkXPress at the desktop to small workgroups and on up to large worldwide enterprise uses. 

What is Dynamic Publishing?

Dynamic Publishing can mean a range of things, depending on its use. Quark focuses on four key ideas:

• Content first: Focus on authoring the content first, independent of the context, formatting or media in which it will ultimately appear.  Today most content is written for a specific media (e.g., Print, Web, etc.) often with the formatting included. This makes it difficult or impossible to repurpose without significant additional manual work.
• A single source of content: one large database of smart text components, graphic elements, and other files related to projects. Uniquely, this repository contains your active projects as well as your archived projects and elements.
• Multiple output channels: only Quark’s solution guarantees consistency in branding and messaging across all publications, media and languages. It also allows simultaneous publishing to multiple media - for example, newspapers may publish to the Web first and then to the print edition; or marketing departments that need both printed and PDF brochures, and also need the same content on their website.
• Automation: generates documents with minimal human interaction, customized for different audiences, markets or media. This is now a common need when disseminating information, in one or multiple languages.

How And Why It’s Useful For Designers

Imagine being able to create designs that can be quickly or automatically populated with appropriate information for a specific audience or media or geography - designs that maintain brand consistency while allowing contextual variation.

Imagine being able to immediately find the current version of any text, picture, caption, or combination (”story”), and instantly pull it into a project. Not just in QuarkXPress, but in other applications as well.

Then imagine that later, “downstream” users such as marketing departments could reuse the pieces of your projects in their own projects. And they always grab the current version. (!)

What Makes Quark’s Solution Successful

According to Joshua, designers, publishers and corporate communications people have similar needs, often within the same company. Earlier in this story, I mentioned designers and publishers, but corporate users have different challenges:

• Delivering consistent internal communications to workers
• Communicating with customers, outside dealers and partners
• Localization of content, either regionally or internationally
• While appearance is certainly important, the sheer volume of information flow creates a different kind of problem for tracking and consistency
• Scalability is key because of potential growth factors
• In regulated industries, product labeling and product statements need to be universally controlled and tracked

He points out that from his meetings with publishers and corporations worldwide, Quark’s solution is being chosen over other products for several reasons:

• Quark has a vision that is clearly understood because it aligns with the needs of companies.
• Quark’s Dynamic Publishing Solution (Quark DPS) engages at a higher level in the organization - a strategic level that encompasses broader aspects of the business.
• Quark’s solution can be easily integrated into existing solutions such as Microsoft Sharepoint - far more easily than competing solutions.
• Quark’s solution can output to a wide variety of formats, not just Adobe’s formats or Microsoft’s formats. For example, Quark can output to Flash and SilverLight, PDF, Microsoft Word, XML, HTML, DITA (widely used for documentation), PRISM, NewsML and SPL (Structured Product Labeling, an initiative of the U.S. FDA).
• In contrast, Adobe’s solution focuses only on publishing: newspaper, books and magazines.
• Content can be authored in Microsoft Word. Earlier this year, Quark acquired a company named In.vision Research Corporation so that users can author XML in Microsoft Word for immediate use in Quark Publishing System. According to Joshua, this produces completely structured XML, not just the formatted text that Word 2007/2008 is capable of exporting. In essence, it provides XML authoring for average users, in an add-on for Word named Xpress Author. (Note to Quark: since you’re all about brand consistency, why not uppercase the P and make it XPress Author?)

Surprises For The Future

Given the flexibility and openness of Quark’s software, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ventured into even greater territory with it — vastly greater territory. They’ve already embraced Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, PDF, Microsoft SilverLight, Word, and XML authoring… watch for some news next week that will put this story into a very different perspective. ;-)

Joshua Duhl, Director of Enterprise Product Marketing

Joshua Duhl, Director of Enterprise Product Marketing

Joining Quark in early 2008, Joshua Duhl guides the product direction and marketing of Quark’s enterprise products. Duhl comes to Quark with over 20 years of marketing, product management, market analysis, software engineering, and consulting experience. He was most recently Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at ClearStory Systems, a digital asset management (DAM) software vendor, where he led the company’s product strategy, roadmap and rollout. Duhl was Director of Research for IDC’s Content Management and Rich Media software service, covering the content management, DAM, authoring software, dynamic publishing and digital rights management markets. He was selected by IDC’s clients as one of three 2003 Global Research Advisory Council Analysts of the Year. Prior to 2003, Duhl ran Stillpoint Consulting, an independent consultantcy providing strategic marketing, product planning and positioning guidance to a variety of software companies. He holds a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Haverford College

If you use a Macintosh, it’s about time you realize how many hours of work this feature will save you — and could have been saving you since QuarkXPress 4. You’re gonna love this once you realize all the things these scripts can do. I want to compare the Scripts menu in Quark 4, 5 and 6 to the Scripts menu in Quark 7 and 8, just to show that you could have been doing these things years ago. As I explored this menu, I literally cried — I couldn’t believe I never tried to see what this cryptic little menu does. This strange white parchment at the right side of the menu bar could have saved me many late nights in Quark. In my next few entries I’d like to show you how to use each one. Commander Riker, let’s begin with the Box Tools. Engage!

A short digression to set the stage…

When a movie is released, certain scenes never make it to the final cut. The scenes that tell the story and guide the plot are the ones that survive. It’s usually the scenes that really enhance the story that end up on the cutting room floor. Programs are no different. When a newer version of a program is released, the programmers try to include all the new feature requests that users want (I would like to think.) Certain requests that would enhance the program are not always added to the actual program, because of time or resources, and they are then added as scripts. If a script is successful, it can only hope to one day make it into the Directors Cut (Quark 8.)

Take for example the Jabba the Hutt scene of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. Lucas didn’t have enough time or money to include it in the movie (program) the way he wanted so he waited till a later release. (Click here to see what I mean.) What I think about updating movies vs. updating programs is for another blog…

Here’s what Quark left on the cutting room floor…

The Box Tools Scripts Menu in Quark 4, 5 and 6.

The Box Tools Scripts Menu in Quark 7 and 8.

You will notice that there were many more scripts in Quark 4, 5 and 6. The reason why they are not there in Quark 7 and 8 is because those functions were added to the program itself.

Add Crop Marks

This is a great and necessary feature for anyone whose printer has ever asked for crop marks. Instead of manually drawing crop marks for the printer, you can use this feature — which has been around since Quark 4!

Let’s say you need to print an ad with crop marks. Just select the outside box of your ad, then choose Scripts> Box Tools> Add Crop Marks.

Adding Crop Marks to a box.

Center Box on Page

This little gem of a script disappeared in QuarkXPress 7 after Quark added “Item Relative” and Page Relative” to the alignment options in the Item> Space/Align menu, and in the Measurements palette.

If you have an item in Quark 4, 5 or 6 that you need to center on the page, you can choose Script > Box Tools> Center Box on Page.

Here is the script at work in Quark 6.

Ever since Quark 7 you can find the command right in the Measurements palette. And I may add that Quark had this command NINE YEARS before InDesign CS3 did.

Here is the menu command in Quark 8.

Drop Shadow

This one is pretty basic, though I admit it would have been helpful to know about. Before QuarkXPress 7, you needed a commercial XTension called Shadowcaster to get a true drop shadow effect. Quark 7 and above have built-in drop shadow effects, but if you want to try Shadowcaster in Quark 7, you can get it for free at: http://labs.quark.com/projects.aspx.

Here are the Drop Shadow options in the Measurements palette.

In Quark 4, 5 or 6, you could apply this script to all your selected boxes, including Picture Boxes, Text Boxes or None Boxes. When it runs, the script asks you for offset amounts, and whether or not to Overprint the shadow.

The first Drop Shadow script window.

The second Drop Shadow script window.

The third Drop Shadow script window.

The final drop shadow.

It wasn’t much: it was a black box offset with a 30% shade. There was no feather back then, but it was still a huge timesaver.

Easy Banner

For at least one full year of my life, I created car ads for newspapers in Quark. Day after day, I would insert new cars where old cars once existed. I would constantly be asked by sales people to insert a banner in the top left corner of the ad that read “New” or a price of “$2000.” Then there were the real estate ads. These images needed descriptions such as “Just Listed” or “Priced to Sell.” At first I would always hand draw each banner with the pen tool. At print time, these quick solutions never lined up the way I wanted. I eventually drew them correctly and save them as items in a Library, which made my job easier. However, I still needed to resize them, and depending on the layout they sometimes looked disproportionate. Then, there I was again editing the banner with the pen tool. If I had known this script existed in Quark 4, 5 and 6, I wouldn’t have told anyone. I would have let everyone think I was the Banner Master.

Banner Master pointing to his work.

Easy Banner is located under Scripts> Box Tools> Easy Banner. It literally makes a banner for you!

The first window asks you “What should the Banner say?” The banner really doesn’t say anything. Since this banner is for print, the question should be “What should the Banner read? But I’m just splitting hairs…

The second window asks you to “Select a Text Color.” Do it.

The third window asks you to “Select a Box Color.” Do this also.

Then a whole lot of really quick magical things happen. A shape is created, text is added, its suddenly rotated, and then it is clipped to the shape of the picture box! Amazing! Use as needed…

Make Caption Box

These last two scripts still have a home in Quark 7 and 8. If you work for any kind of publication where you are constantly making caption boxes under photos, you need to know this exists. Instead of making a text box under each box, then somehow getting the caption, I’ve got a nice little workflow for you. Select the image that needs the caption. Choose Scripts> Box> Tools> Make Caption Box.

Here’s where you can enter the caption.

The empty caption window appears. Now here’s a good idea… If you have photographers who are saving the photos for you somewhere on the server and giving you a separate text file or Word document for the captions, stop doing that. Once the photographer is done making their masterpiece in Photoshop, have them go to File > File Info in Photoshop and type or copy the caption into the Description section.

Now you can use Bridge to locate the photo you need and even drag and drop that image onto your Quark page in Quark 8. When you need the caption info, simply right click the image in Bridge and choose File Info. You will see the same File Info they inserted in Photoshop.

You can right-click a photo in Bridge to get file info.

The Bridge File Info Window.

Copy this Info and paste it into the empty caption window.

The placed caption.

You have no control over the size of the caption‘s text box (although you could alter the script). So, why not make yourself an Item Style in Quark 8 and apply it once the box is created? Then apply a paragraph style as needed. Or… since the caption text is automatically assigned the “Normal” paragraph style, you could change your Normal style to whatever you want the captions to look like. You could also potentially redefine the preferences of the text box tool before you use the script, to control the runaround of the caption box.

Shrink or Grow at Center

I actually could have used this one for a couple of the posts I’ve made at PlanetQuark.com. Here is the most perfect example I can think of: let’s say that you normally create a box to use as an outside frame, and then you create another box that is inset exactly 9 pt from this frame. The outside box could be any size, but the inside box is always 9 pt away from the edge of the outside box. Here‘s what to do: Copy your first box and Paste it in Place. (Edit> Paste In Place) Now use the Shrink script to shrink your box proportionately by 18 pt. You now have a box that is smaller and exactly 9 points away from the outside box.

Here is another example:

In this example I drew a box around the picture and the text. My goal is to create a larger box that surrounds the picture and text.

Draw a box around whatever you’d like to surround.

I gave the box a black frame. I then chose Scripts> Box Tools> Shrink or Grow at Center.

Enter the amount to Shrink or Grow.

If your box has a picture in it, there are all kinds of ways to scale it — I encourage you to try each one.

Scale it in whatever manner seems fit.

After I grew this box I sent it to the back and gave it a blue color.

The final result.

So there you have it… Those are the Box Tools scripts in Quark 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. I urge you to try these tools whenever you have a chance and try to fit them into your everyday workflow. They could really save you a lot of time. Just don’t tell your boss, and spend a little bit more time exploring Planet Quark for me…

What are these things?

Simply put, they’re the other pieces of Quark’s publishing workflow system. (Apologies to Quark: this is my simplified view of what these pieces do…)

Quark Publishing System 8: an editorial system that manages stories and other assets, so that many people can work at the same time, using the same assets, when publishing various editions of printed or website publications. Writers write, editors edit, layout people lay out pages or websites, and artwork editors create and edit artwork. All the while, everything is available in real time to anyone with the permission to use them. It can even output in Flash format.

For a bit more info, check out our stories on the previous versions at Quark Releases Quark Publishing System 7 and Quark Publishing System 7.4 Adds Support for Leopard, Safari, LDAP, Full Text Search, Russian and Polish.

QuarkCopyDesk8: a limited version of QuarkXPress, with additional features dedicated to editing and tracking changes to stories. A layout artist in QuarkXPress decides which page elements should be available for editing by a copy writer/editor, and then that writer/editor can work in real time on the same layout. If allowed to, they can also tweak pictures using Quark’s powerful image-editing features.

You can read more about how QuarkCopyDesk works here, Quark’s Word Processor.

QuarkXPress Server 8: a publishing engine that can generate pages in HTML, PDF, QuarkXPress and other formats, based on either user input or rules that combine images and text and places them on the page.

You can read more about how some folks are using QuarkXPress Server at Seemingly Magical Ad Production.

How do they compare to Adobe’s tools?

Many experts agree that Quark’s system is much easier to implement than Adobe’s server tools, saving lots of setup time and expense, as well as lower ongoing support costs. Here’s a report that explains what I mean:

“Report Analyses Quark Publishing System 7, Smart Connection Enterprise, and K4″
Quark’s press release goes so far as to say this:

“QPS is the most flexible and easy-to-use workflow system available today. Unlike Woodwing’s Smart Connection Enterprise and Softcare’s K4, only QPS offers XML-based Job Jackets technology to evaluate design and content accuracy in order to prevent errors early in the production process. Only QPS offers ready-made integration with Alfresco Enterprise 2, the leading open-source content management system. In addition, it is the easiest workflow system to set up because it is configured through a graphical user interface instead of a browser interface or text-based configuration scripts. QPS also works with more desktop applications than Smart Connection Enterprise and K4.”

What’s this Alfresco thing?

Alfresco Enterprise 2 is the leading open source content management system, allowing users to store assets in a single repository and view and update content in real-time. The “open source” bit is particularly important: all of Quark’s publishing tools use open standards, so you’re never locked in to one company’s vision of how you should do your work.

What else is new?

In QPS 8:

• User interface support for 13 languages including Japanese, as well as hyphenation and spell checking for more than 30 languages, enabling advanced international collaboration. Just like in QuarkXPress 8, you can publish in every major language and share the same document with users in every nation.
• Improved asset management through QPS Connect Client, including multi-page preview, multiple asset check-in, metadata tagging, custom grouping, and full text search functionality. QPS Connect Client is an application for Mac or Windows that lets users manage and contribute content from anywhere with Internet access.
• QPS Web Hub support for East Asian languages, including the support for Rubi and Group Characters. QPS Web Hub lets you use a Web browser to view assignments and write, edit, and copyfit text. Managers can monitor publications and projects, as well as track and adjust user workloads — all using a Web browser.
• Support for native Adobe Illustrator file formats. Enough said.

In QuarkCopyDesk8:

• Adopts QuarkXPress 8’s new intuitive interface, advanced typographical control, and support for East Asian text.

• Adopts the other poweful new features of QuarkXPress 8, including drag-and-drop from any application, media browser, Adobe Bridge, or the desktop.

Availability

Quark says that Quark Publishing System 8, QuarkCopyDesk 8 and QuarkXPress Server 8 will be available in Q4 2008. They’ll be demonstrating it at IFRA Expo on October 27–30, and at Graph Expo on October 26–29.

The Shared Content palette appeared in QuarkXPress 6 as the Synchronized Text palette. If you’ve never used it before, I’d like to explain what it can do for you, and what you may have never thought it can do for you. Let’s start with the basics…

The Synchronized Text palette that appeared in QuarkXPress 6 lets you synchronize text, such as an address, so if you need to use the address again, you can drag the content onto another location, or even an entirely different layout within a project. If you then change the address in one of the instances, all of your synchronized text will update across all of your layouts within the project.

The Synchronized Text palette in QuarkXPress 6 is located under Window> Show Synchronized Text. Once you open the palette, you can synchronize the entire contents of a text box. Let’s consider a scenario where you have a job producing collateral material for a hotel. They need a brochure, letterhead, envelope, and a postcard. Since Quark 6 lets you create multiple layouts within a Project you could design all four documents within one project by selecting Layout> New. Instead of typing the address four times, once for each document, you type the address in once, then make it Synchronized Text. You do this in Quark 6 by selecting some or all of the text and clicking the Synchronized Text button in the top left of the palette. The first dialog box that appears asks you if you’d like to “Synchronize the entire contents of the box?” You really don’t have a choice here, its OK or Cancel. OK makes Synchronized Text from the entire content of the text box, and of course Cancel stops this whole process. Choose OK and accept it. You might even just check the “Do not show this warning again” checkbox. This somehow makes me feel empowered.

This is the first dialog box that appears.

After you click OK, another dialog box appears that asks you to name the item. Give it a name that is relevant and click OK.

Name your Synchronized Content.

You can now see the content listed in your Synchronized Content palette.

Your new Synchronized Content is now in the palette.

To use the Synchronized Content, make another text box either on the current layout, or on another layout. Then drag and drop your Synchronized Content into the new text box.

Dragging Synchronized Content into the new text box.

The content should now appear inside your new text box. You can do this as many times as you like. It almost acts like a text macros out of Microsoft Word. Anything that you find that you need to type over and over again, you can make into Synchronized Content.

Another benefit is that if the text should have to change because it was typed incorrectly, or because you are now doing the same campaign for another hotel with a different address, you an change one instance of the Synchronized Content, and each one updates.

Updating one instance of Synchronized Content automatically updates all instances.

Then along came QuarkXPress 7…
QuarkXPress 7 really added a whole bunch of new options to the Synchronized Content palette, and because of Collaboration Setup (which lets you place or share a Quark layout inside another layout) and the fact that you could now synchronize or share pictures, it was now named the Shared Content palette. There are three approaches to sharing either a picture box or a text frame. You can share just the content of a text box, just like you could do by using Synchronized Content in Quark 6. But now in Quark 7 you can share the content of a picture box, which means that if you change the Shared Content of a logo inside a picture box then all the other boxes where you used that Shared Content will also update. Or you can share the Attributes of the content as well as the Content itself. This means that if you change the font or increase the text size of one Shared Content instance, they all change. And finally you could also Synchronize the box attributes, which means it would remember the box size, its frame, and any other box attributes. Let’s take a look at how these work.

The Shared Content palette in Quark 7 and Quark 8 is located under Window> Shared Content. Whether you select a text box with the Item or Content tool, it will still let you make a new instance of Shared Content. Once you have either a text box with some text in it or a picture box selected, you can either click on the New Shared Content icon in the top left of the palette, or use the double-arrow drop-down menu in the top left of the palette and select New.

Creating new Shared Content.

It is within the Shared Item Properties dialog box that you can choose exactly which properties you wish to share with the Shared Content.

The Shared Item Properties.

If you choose Content Only, and don’t check Synchronize Box Attributes, this feature will work exactly how it worked in QuarkXPress 6 with Synchronized Text.

If you choose Synchronize Content and have both Content and Attributes checked, it will remember what the text or picture attributes are (font, size, color, etc.) when the content is used elsewhere in the Project.

Choosing Shared Item Properties.

Once you have defined the new Shared Content, it appears inside your Shared Content palette. Since this type of content is only the content of a box, it cannot just be dragged onto a page — you must first create a new text or picture box. Then you can drag the Shared Content into the box. Notice how it remembers styling of the type. If you were to change one instance of the Shared Content, they would all update.

Synchronizing both Content and Attributes.

To take it a step further you can also synchronize the attributes of the box itself. By checking Synchronize Box Attributes in the Shared Item Properties dialog box, Quark will not only remember the text, and how the text was styled, but it will also remember the attributes of the box containing it (frame, background color, alignment, inset, etc…). Now that you have synchronized the box attributes you can simply drag the box out of the Shared Content palette and use it within any of your layouts, and it will retain the same look! Then, if you update one instance, they will all update. Synchronizing content in the Shared content palette inside Quark 7 and 8 can be a huge timesaver for any universal changes you need to make to documents. So think it over, where could this tool help you in your current workflow? Once you find a place to use it, USE IT!

Synchronizing both Content and Attributes.

While exploring the boundaries of Shared Content I found a somewhat unconventional way to using this feature. Follow me on this one…

Let’s say you have a “Tip” box of information that uses three or four different text styles. In the old Quark (or the newer ones) you could drag that text box into a Library for later use, and then drag the text box onto any page as needed. (Window> Library) You would then type in the new “Tip” info. You could also set up each style to have a Next style, so that as you typed, the text would automatically be formatted in the Next Style. If you also wanted to have a “style sheet” for the box itself, you could use an XPert Item Style in Quark 7 or an Item Style in Quark 8.

But let’s say you don’t use Libraries, even though you should! Why? Because an item stored in a Library is so easy to drag and drop onto the page! And let’s say you don’t use any Styles…. I won’t even comment on that one. But let’s just say…

Instead, you could make the “Tip” box a piece of Shared Content. This way you could just drop it on the page. Just be sure not to synchronize the Content when you add it to the Shared Content palette. Essentially, you would be using the Shared content palette as a Library – but with more features. This also saves you from having to applying Styles. (However, if Styles were applied, they would be remembered.)

Using Shared Content like a Library.

Either way you slice it, Shared Content can help you synchronize your content at any level you choose.

My favorite quote:
“I love QXP 8 but hated the big green move tool so, I changed it. :-)”

Here’s Dave’s take on it:

For reference, here’s the original design in QuarkXPress 8:

I think his design is pretty good… I like how it would seem familiar to Adobe users and yet Quark users wouldn’t be confused by it.

Of course, the interface team at Quark has been working on these tiny details for a couple of years now. I imagine it went through zillions of reviews before being decided upon, so they’re probably not too excited about reviewing another design.

And then I thought: Wouldn’t it be great if Quark let you “skin” XPress? I’ll bet there’s a place somewhere in the application code that calls to a graphic for use in the toolbox. With some surgery, you could maybe grab their graphic, make it the way you like it, and then save it back to its original location.

And guess what? They have (sort of). It turns out that can change the colors of the interface by changing values in a plain text file. The explanation was posted here. As an example, he provides this color scheme:

For those of us who enjoy a Dreamsicle every now and again, Michel Lemieux posted this scheme:

Quark’s Matthias Guenther is even holding a competition to find the best color schemes. The details are in his post.

But hurry: the Matthias Color Competition ends Aug 31, 2008.

Just another pretty face

Another Dan Logan-titled finally feature: font names displayed in their own typeface by default — in every place that font typeface options are displayed. You will find WYSIWYG fonts in the style menu, the character dialogue box, and even the measurements palette.

I think every QuarkXPress user on the planet has requested this feature, but in case I misread the poll, you can press SHIFT before choosing a font list to temporarily disable this feature. Turn it off altogether in the application preferences.

Oh, and one more thing: font formats are easily identified by the icon to the left of the name O for OpenType, TT for TrueType, and so on. Red icons indicate PostScript and green icons indicate TrueType. These icons also extend to the family menus where you will now be able to easily identify when you have mixed font formats — and choose whether or not to mix them up in your document.

A WYSIWYG font list may be the most requested feature.

Along with the new font list, QuarkXPress 8 also logically sorts the entries. East Asian fonts (e.g., Korean, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese) are not just thrown into an alphabetical listing. They are now divided into common-sense groups. It is also OS sensitive so that if using a Japanese OS, those fonts would list higher in the category rankings.

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
First of all, let me tell you that I am a lover and collector of fonts. I love them all — tall, fat, serif, sans-serif, script, and all the crazies too. When I am designing, I love to use new and different fonts. I created a challenge for myself as a designer to know what each font looked like. That way I could picture the font in my mind that was needed for a certain project, and pull up its name by memory. Unfortunately, I could never remember them all. I can remember sitting at my desk, using Quark 4, and manually selecting each font to see if that was the font that would fit. Then one day I found the box that Quark 4 shipped with and inside was a little keyboard shortcut panel that fit perfectly on top of my keyboard, reminding me of what each Function key did.

This little piece of parchment changed my life. It was here I found out that holding the Option key (Control key in Windows) and pressing F9 while type is selected would cycle forward through all my fonts, so I could preview my text in each different font! (Tip: if you go past one you like, add the Shift key to the keyboard shortcut, and you can back up the fonts.) This made designing so much easier.

Now in QuarkXPress 8 they have finally added WYSIWYG menus. I love it. Every time you go to Style> Font, or scroll through the Fonts menu in the Measurements palette, you now see the font name displayed in its actual typeface!

Notice that the fonts not only appear in their own typefaces, but the icons indicate what kind of font format they are — it even distinguishes between the OpenType variants! (OpenType fonts based on PostScript are in red, while TrueType-based OpenType fonts are in blue.)

What kind of font it is?
Another part of QuarkXPress 8 I love is that fonts are now displayed with a logo next to the font telling you what kind of font it is. No more guessing is you are using an OpenType, a TrueType, or a PostScript font. Being able to see this info in the menu saves you countless hours of checking what kind of fonts you are using in your document — especially if you need to collaborate with someone on Windows while you design on a Mac, and you’re asked to design with OpenType fonts.

Easier Navigation in Quark 8
Navigating text boxes is also easier than ever in QuarkXPress 8. As always, you can use the Content tool to select and edit text, but what about if you really need to get back to the Item tool? You could hold down Command (Macintosh), or Control (Windows) to access this tool. But it never really takes you to the Item tool — it’s only temporary. In Quark 8 you can press the ESC key while you’re in the Content tool and it automatically “escapes” you to the Item tool. Now how do you go back to the Content tool? Don’t click it in the toolbar! Just double-click on a text box and the Item tool automatically turns into the Content tool!

Faux Bold & Italic
I was really hoping this feature would be completely removed from Quark 8, or at least that Quark would intelligently remove the Bold and Italic options from fonts that don’t have Bold and Italic variants. At least Quark 8 has diminished the size of the buttons, and hid some of the worst culprits like Shadow under a drop-down menu. It’s as if it is saying “Nothing to see over here!” The best part is the new Remove All Formatting option in the drop-down menu. At least now there is a tool that can now remove any crazy type styling that has happened in Quark.

Notice how small the Bold and Italic buttons have become. I sense their imminent death in Quark 9.

Superior Opacity Control
Quark had the foresight to not limit designers when applying Opacity to type. Some other nameless programs don’t let you apply different opacity settings to individual characters in a text box. This is an awesome feature in Quark 7 and Quark 8.

Random Notes:
Wendy
For any other font-lovers that may be reading this, if you’re looking for a good handwriting script I urge you to check out Garrett Boge’s Wendy. It is amazing how the characters interact with one another — imagine the calculations that must have gone into this beautiful script!

Wendy is my new favorite font. You can get it here.

Font Conference Video
I recently discovered this really funny video about a font conference at www.collegehumor.com And Terri Stone’s review of it is hilarious! I’m a big fan of Futura’s work!
Till we meet again, explore your fonts, and just have fun with them. People work really hard to create these masterpieces, and you should use them to their fullest extent.

One final tip: the next time you’re bored in Quark choose Window> Glyphs and see what has been created for you! Fonts rule!

Still using QuarkXPress 7? This tip applies to you as well. Just install Quark’s free XPert FindChange and follow along…

IT’S CHANGING TIME

By adding these instructions to this point in the story line, I do not mean to imply that you may only find and change settings of items to which you have previously applied an item style. In fact, this feature is completely independent of item styles, but the technology is also an integration of the features from ALAP’s XPert Tools.

First we’ll look at a shortcut then explore the long version. Refer to the image below to follow along.

1. Click on an item to sample styles that you wish to find and change. (For example, if you wish to find a particular line weight, no matter the color, select a line of that weight.)
2. Choose EDIT > ITEM FIND/CHANGE.
3. Optionally, navigate to the panel that has the attributes you wish to find.
4. Click the fly-out menu and choose either ACQUIRE ALL ATTRIBUTES or ACQUIRE PANEL ATTRIBUTES (to find only those attributes contained within the current panel). You may add to or remove any of these attributes.
5. In the right-hand pane (change to), choose the attributes that you wish to apply to items that meet the criteria you have defined on the left.
6. From the lower edge of the dialogue box, choose to what items you wish to limit the search.
7. Click FIND NEXT.
8. Click CHANGE THEN FIND, CHANGE, or CHANGE ALL, continuing until you have completed the search routine, or until you have found those instances that you wanted to change.
9. Close the window.

Using the acquire attributes option, you can cut down on the time and the guesswork when finding attributes — especially helpful when lots of attributes have been applied and need to be changed. As you can see above, you may also clear attributes that you sampled.

If you don’t already have an item with the attributes you wish to find and change, simply follow these steps:

1. Choose EDIT > ITEM FIND/CHANGE.
2. From each relevant panel, in the left-hand pane (find what), choose the item attributes that you wish to find.
3. From each relevant panel, in the right-hand pane (change to), choose the item attributes that you wish to apply to items that meet the criteria you have defined on the left.
4. From the lower edge of the dialogue box, choose to what items you wish to limit the search.
5. Click FIND NEXT.
6. Click CHANGE THEN FIND, CHANGE, or CHANGE ALL, continuing until you have completed the search routine, or until you have found those instances that you wanted to change.
7. Close the window.

Figure 62 The item find/change dialogue box functions in essentially the same manner as the find/change dialogue box for text: define what to find on the left and define the changes you wish to make on the right.

Note: It is not required that you provide a change to attribute for each attribute on which you place find criteria.