A similar technique can be used to simulate embossing with live text. Here’s how:

• Type your text and color it white.
• Set the opacity of the text to 0%.
• Apply a drop shadow to the text.
• In the Drop Shadows tab of the Measurements palette, uncheck the Inherit Opacity option.
• In the Drop Shadows tab of the Measurements palette, check Item Knocks Out Drop Shadow.

Live, Embossed Text in QuarkXPress

The text is still live, so you can change the text, or the font, or the size, or anything else you want to do to text.

The video is an excerpt from the Talented Pixies tutorials, presented by Mike Strange. You can watch it here.

To adjust kerning (spacing between two letters), or tracking (spacing between a range of letters):
Press Command-Shift-[ to reduce kerning or tracking.
Press Command-Shift-] to increase kerning or tracking. 

To adjust leading:
Press Command-Shift-; to increase leading
Press Command-Shift-’ to decrease leading

To adjust word spacing:
Hold down all the modifier keys (Shift-Option-Command-Control) and press the [ key (to tighten) or ] (to loosen).

To remove all manual kerning, tracking and word spacing, choose Utilities> Remove Manual Kerning.

Windows users: replace Command with Ctrl and Option with Alt.

Just put an empty box over the area you want to fade, then fill it with a gradient that goes from 100% white to None.

In QuarkXPress 8, the Bezier Pen tool works completely differently — in fact, it works exactly like the Pen tool in Adobe products. If you click on a different tool, your path remains open and the entire path is selected.

Just use the ballot box glyph from the Webdings font, and then apply negative tracking to the boxes, so that their left and right edges overlap without doubling up. In QuarkXPress, use -12 in the tracking field in the Measurements palette. Be sure not to justify the line though, because that will spread the boxes out.

Other timesavers: press Command-0 to fit the page to the window. (Windows: Ctrl-0) Press Command-1 for 100% view. (Windows: Ctrl-1)

For other views, press Control-V to highlight the View Percentage area at the bottom left corner of your document window, and then type in any view percentage you’d like. (Or type T to view your document as Thumbnails!)

Regardless of the reason, if you need to globally replace that process color with a spot color, do this:

1. Create the spot color.
2. Since QuarkXPress won’t let you delete or redefine any of the CMYK colors, you need to use Find/Change everywhere that color is used.

First, use Edit> Find/Change to replace the colors in all the text. Then, to change all uses of the color in page items, do this: 

In QuarkXPress 8, choose Edit> Item Find/Change to change all instances of one color to another color. 

In QuarkXPress 7, install Quark’s free XPert Tools set of XTensions and use XPert FindChange. 
(If XPert Tools wasn’t included in the box with your copy of QuarkXPress 7, you can download it from Quark’s website.)

To do this in earlier versions of QuarkXPress, you’ll need to acquire an older version of alap’s XPert Tools, which was a commercial product before Quark acquired alap.

As you can see, you can assign a folder where Quark will first go when you invoke a dialog box that wants a location to save a file or get some content. You can assign a different location for each kind of import — in this example, Quark will show my “Pictures for QXP” folder whenever I ask it to import a picture.

This feature is especially helpful in workgroups, because you’ll often be opening files from one folder, importing pictures from another, importing text from a third, and saving to a fourth. Quark can handle it all for you!

I exaggerate, but not much. There are approximately 1,547 keyboard shortcuts in QuarkXPress that don’t appear in the menus. (OK, now I’m exaggerating — but you get my point.) Some of the most important are shown here:

But more importantly, they’re now AVAILABLE here for you to select at any time. Just click in a text box with your Text tool and choose utilities> Insert Character, then pick one. And don’t overlook the Nonbreaking characters:

These little goodies will guarantee one of two things:

• The nonbreaking En dash, Em dash and Hyphen will ensure that a hyphenated word or series of numbers will not break at the hyphen. This is useful in many circumstances, such as when an ambiguous meaning arises when the word is broken at the hyphen.
• The nonbreaking spaces ensure that the spaces between a series of words will not break at the end of a line — the words will hyphenate if hyphenation is turned on, but the line will not break at a word space.