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!

Now, because of the changes Quark made to QuarkXPress 8, it’s much more likely that designers will discover these Pen tools and forego a trip to Adobe Illustrator. The tools are now featured in a prominent place in the Tools palette, and they now behave the same way as the equivalent tools do in Illustrator.

While Quark’s Bézier tools aren’t designed to replace the other design applications you rely on, they are powerful enough to easily create complex vector-based objects, saving you the time and trouble of switching applications just to create them. More complex designs will likely still require Illustrator, but the vast majority of common objects can be created right inside QuarkXPress.

The Bézier tool set includes Add and Remove point tools, along with Convert Point, Scissors, Select Point, and Freehand Drawing tools. It also includes straight and curved line segments, and symmetrical, smooth and corner points. Point and line segments can be changed once they are created, so you don’t have to worry if you start a line or shape with corner points when you really wanted smooth points instead.

To create a line, start by selecting the Add Point Bézier tool, and then click where you want the points on your line to appear. Double-clicking ends the line, and Double-clicking on the starting point creates a closed shape. The Add Point Bézier tool is smart, too. Clicking on an already created line adds a new point, and clicking on an existing point removes it — no special keyboard combination’s required.

Need to change the properties of a point or line segment? Use the Select Point tool to grab the part you want to modify, and go to the Classic tab in the Measurements Palette to make the changes

You can grab segments to move them. Anchor points have handles so you can change corner angles and arcs; shapes can be scaled and rotated; and you can fill shapes with colors or even with other objects. If this sounds a lot like the way Adobe Illustrator works, that’s because it is.

Before you dump Illustrator for QuarkXPress 8’s Bézier tools, however, be sure to find out what the output requirements are for your project. Some print providers, especially in the screen printing market, require Illustrator-native files and won’t be pleased to receive QuarkXPress documents. The good news is that if you export your file to EPS or PDF format, it can be opened by Illustrator with full vector editability maintained, so anyone with Illustrator can convert and use your vector drawing.

QuarkXPress 8’s Bézier tools are especially powerful because the perform they way you expect, but they aren’t bogged down with overly complex features. They may not keep you from launching Adobe Illustrator, but they will cut down on the time you spend there.

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.

In it, she assumes you know nothing except how to create text and picture boxes in QuarkXPress, then leads you step-by-step through the process of creating simple (but impressive) examples of:

• Presentation: a layout that you can export as a Flash SWF animation.
• Button: a multi-state button that can start and stop your animation, for instance.
• Image sequence: a sequence of images that when played present an animation.

If you’re curious about how to use your existing QuarkXPress skills to easily create Flash animations, I highly encourage you to have a look at her article at: www.xraymag.com/articles/xray_v5n6_quark_interactive_01.html

And be sure to click the graphic in the header.

Whenever you open a QuarkXPress document, and define a text frame, and start to type, you are typing in a Paragraph  Style Sheet called Normal. There is really no way around it. Every time you make a new text frame and type in Quark you type in Helvetica. Why is it Helvetica? Because Helvetica is Normal. Confused yet? Let’s take a closer look at what is Normal, what styles are, why to use them, and all the other good stuff that goes along with that…

For those of you who may not be familiar with the Style Sheets palette, let’s slow it down for a minute and start at the beginning.

What is a Style?

A style can remember all the changes you make to type, so when you have to do them again, it becomes a one-click apply. For example, every time you have to style a header in a newsletter (the name of the section), you choose Times New Roman, then change it to Bold, then change the color, then change the point size. Now do that 30 times. My Carpal Tunnel is aching just thinking about that. Instead you can define a new Paragraph Style in QuarkXPress. Now the next time you want to apply all of those attributes to some text, just click on the new style you defined as header.

In the Style Sheets palette you have two different sections. The top half of the window represents what are known as Paragraph Styles, the bottom half contains Character Styles. Paragraph Styles apply a style to a whole paragraph, while Character Styles are applied to just what you have selected. That is why Character Styles are best for things like bold, italic, and colorizing text.

Why use styles?

I am a self proclaimed Style-Nazi. It frustrates me when people don’t see the value of Style Sheets. Style Sheetscan make your time spent in Quark so much more productive. Imagine this: You work in production, laying out books. You get a template from the “Creative” department, you spend months laying out a book, making sure the look and feel of type is the same across the whole book. You don’t use styles. At the end of the process, someone decides to make major design changes to all of your intro paragraphs, headers and captions. Life is not good. By making the decision to not use styles, whether consciously or unconsciously, you really made making any universal changes to your document an extreme amount of work.
Now let’s say you you’ve suddenly seen how powerful Style Sheets can be. So instead of doing what I described above, you lay out the book using Style Sheets. The changes come in, you change the styles in one document, then append the changed styles into all of your other documents (if they are separate documents). Done.

How do I start using styles?

I often get asked, “I see the importance of Style Sheets, but I never have used them. Where do I start?” Well, If you already have a finished piece: a newsletter, publication, brochure, really any document that is more than a page, you can see that styles would be of benefit to your workflow. Go to each of the places on a page where you’ve styled some text, select the text, and create a new Style Sheet for that kind of text. (Just click the New button on the Style Sheets palette, as below.)

Do this for all the different kinds of text in your document and name them something logical, so you know what it is next time you go looking for it in your Style Sheets palette. Then you can delete the old text and start laying out new text using your Style Sheets.

Back to Normal

So, as discussed, every time you type, you are in the Normal Paragraph Style. You can’t throw it away, although you could assign No Style which would mean that it is not linked to any Style at all. Just so you know, Microsoft Word has the Normal style sheet, and it behaves the same way.

Can I change what Normal is?

Yes. In QuarkXPress 8 you can select Normal in the Style Sheets palette, then click on the Pencil icon at the top of the palette. In earlier versions of Quark you can choose Edit> Styles Sheets… and then pick Normal. You can then edit Normal and change its attributes to whatever you like. A lot of companies like to change Normal to whatever their most commonly used font is — perhaps their body copy font. This saves a great deal of time. Now every time you define a new text box, you’re already in your company’s font.

I think the second major thing to consider is whether or not you should set the leading to Auto or some exact number. It is of my opinion that you should set it the font in Normal to your body copy, but set the leading at Auto. This way as you grow the size of text you won’t see lines crash into each other. If you leave Normal at a fixed leading, that is what will happen when text size increases.
However, I have had many heated debates with my colleagues that say they hate Auto leading and wouldn’t want to build it into any Style. My rebuttal is that we are just re-defining Normal to give us a head start when creating new text boxes. If you intend the text to be body copy, start typing, highlight it, then apply the Body Style. If you’re creating text that isn’t like an existing Style, set its attributes to the look and feel you want, then create a new Style from it and apply the Style to that text. The great thing about styles is that even if you’re not sure about the final look for the style, you can go ahead and apply it throughout the document, then later edit the Style and watch as it updates across your whole document.

On a page, or forever and ever?

If you change Normal Style while you have a document open, you will redefine what Normal is for that document. If you have no documents open when you edit Normal, every new document will use the re-defined Style of Normal.

Problems with re-defining what Normal is

The most common problem with re-defining the Normal style appears when you copy text between documents. This is one to watch out for. Let’s say in one document Normal is defined as Times, and in another it is defined as Helvetica. When you copy the text from one document to another it will still look the same as it did in the other document, with its local attributes overriding the Style’s attributes.

What is an Override?

If you see a + sign next to the name of the Style Sheet, some attribute in the current text is different from the attributes in the Style Sheet. To clear an override, hold down the Option key (Macintosh) or the Alt key (Windows) then click on the style name. This will remove any manual formatting made to the text.
Overrides can make using Style Sheets to update text not work. For example, if you have Body defined as 11 points, and you change the size of the text on the page to 12 points, you only changed it on the page, but not in the Style. Later, you decide that you want to change the Style so that all of your Body text becomes 14 points. When you edit the Style, all the text updates except the text you manually changed. Herein lies the problem with overrides. If the override is size, and you re-define size, you will not see a change to that text that has the override. So whatever the override is, if you change that attribute in the Style, it won’t update. Beware the override!

Using QuarkXPress 8’s Update Style Sheet feature

Instead of always going into the Style Sheets window to change your Styles, a new feature has been added to QuarkXPress 8 that makes re-defining styles much easier. Highlight some text you want to change, change it, then click the new Update icon at the top of the Style Sheet window. It looks like a green half-circle with an arrow at the end.

For more on the Update Style Sheet feature, see our story: “QuarkXPress 8: Update Your Style Sheets.”

Are you feeling Normal?
I hope this story sheds some light on how to use Styles properly, what Normal is, and what overrides are. Now go back to your machine and try it out. Changing what Normal is could save you a lot of time. Don’t we all wish we could change what Normal is?

Quark has been giving away 12 “XPert Tools” XTensions since April 2007 for use with QuarkXPress 7. They were not part of an update, so unless you’ve had your ear to the ground, listening for free Quark XTensions, you may not have heard of them.

(You can learn about XPert Tools and download them at Quark’s website.)

All of these new XTensions for Quark are extremely useful, and add a greater level of performance to your everyday Quarking. However there are three in particular that I use all the time, and I find are the most useful: XPert Item Styles, XPert Guides, and XPert FindChange. To use these in Quark 7 you will need to download the set of XPert Tools from the previously mentioned Web page, but for those you who with QuarkXPress 8, they are already be built in! Yes, these former free-flying XTensions now have their permanent place in the Window menu in QuarkXPress 8, and you can even include them in your Palette Sets!

My previous posts focused on XPert Item Styles, now simply Item Styles in QuarkXPress 8 and XPert FindChange (now Item Find/Change in QuarkXPress 8.) This time, I’ll discuss XPert Guides, now called simply Guides in QuarkXPress 8.

QuarkXPress 7’s XPert Guides becomes QuarkXPress 8’s Guides — Let me be your guide!

Let’s take a look at how far Guides has come, and what XPert Guides can do for you in QuarkXPress 7, as well as what it can do in QuarkXPress 8.

In QuarkXPress 7 and earlier, you could place Guides on the page by dragging guides either from the horizontal ruler or the vertical ruler. This made lining things up accurately a much easier task than just eyeballing it. When it came time to make a photomontage, or make sure text boxes were aligned, guides were a great asset to your design arsenal. Then it came time to make another issue, or ad, or page. You saved the page using File> Save As…, deleted items that were not reoccurring, and were left with a bunch of random guides that you needed to get rid of. In the early days of Quark, and I will be the first to admit it, I would hand drag each instance of a guide back into the ruler to get rid of the guides on the page.

Then I became part of a secret society, with handshakes and hazing, and all that you would expect from a secret society that was privy to the shortcuts to get rid of guides. As it turns out, there are two types of guides. There are guides that you drag onto the page — those are page guides. These guides don’t go into the pasteboard area, only within a page. Then there are pasteboard guides that can stretch across spreads, alleviating the problem of trying to match two guides on two separate facing pages. When you drag a guide into the pasteboard area it is seen not only on the page, but on the pasteboard as well.

Once initiated into the Chosen Few, I was told that you can get rid of all the Pasteboard guides, as long as you can see the pasteboard of a document: just hold down Option (Macintosh), or Alt (Windows) and click on the ruler. If you are zoomed in and cannot see the Pasteboard, you then get rid of all the Page guides. This makes working with guides that much easier.

Back in 1999, Quark released QuarkXPress 4.1, which added the Guides Manager to the Utilities menu – a feature that was tragically ignored by most users. Guides Manager adds two features: Add Guides and Remove or Lock Guides. Let’s see how Add Guides works.

The Add Guides feature in Guides Manager.

Adding Guides in the Guide Manager is whole lot more accurate than dragging them onto the page. When you drag guides onto a page, you have two options for positioning: keep your eye on the ruler, or keep your eye on the Measurements palette for a more accurate reading of where you are about to place a guide. But if you use the Guides Manager, you can accurately place a guide at, say, 1 inch from the top of your page.

Remove or Lock Guides feature in Guides Manager.

Now for removing and locking guides: the Remove or Lock Guides section of the Guides Manager dialog box lets you remove all the guides on a page! Amazing! Or just remove guides on a certain page, spread, direction. You can also lock or unlock all guides at once, based on page, spread, or direction. This is a major feature that I believe a lot of people missed.

XPert Guides in Quark 7

Then came Quark 7… if you downloaded Quark’s free XPert Tools set of XTensions, you would get my third and probably most favorite tool, XPert Guides. The XPert Guides palette shows you the numerical location of a guide as you drag it onto the page. It also lets you change the color of the guide, whether it is a Page or a Pasteboard Guide, and whether the guide is horizontal or vertical.

The XPert Guides palette in QuarkXPress 7.

If you double-click a Guide you can control its location, as well as whether it is horizontal or vertical, on a page or spread, its color, and whether it is locked or not.

From the palette menu in the upper right corner, you can Delete, Mirror, Create, and either Import or Export Guides.

The palette menu items for XPert Guides.

The Guides Palette in Quark 8

For those of you who are contemplating upgrading to QuarkXPress 8, you should know that they have added the XPert Guides feature to QuarkXPress 8, so you no longer have to download it separately! And they have also enhanced it quite a bit!

Let’s say you have a layout on a left-facing page and you want to give it a second margin to work to, and then you want to mirror that margin on the opposite page. Let’s take a look at how QuarkXPress 8 can help you.

First off, I made the margins of this page .5 inches. I need a box with a semi-opaque white fill that is located .5 inches from that margin. I will put all my type on top of that box. I roughly dragged in my guides first, trying to look at the Measurements palette to see where the guides dropped, but I didn’t care whether they were accurate or not. Why? Because now in Quark 8, you can simply click the location of the guide in the Guides palette and enter an exact measurement.

The new Guides palette with added features in Quark 8!

Next I dragged in the guides for the picture boxes and I turned them red. The great part about the Guides palette is that if I don’t want to see individual guides, I can click on the eyeball to hide them. In QuarkXPress 8 you can hide, show, lock, unlock and scale in the Guides palette without having to visually select the guide on the page.

Controlling the guides for the translucent box.

I then wanted to select all the guides on the page, paste them on another page and flip them so I could have a mirrored layout. (Something you can’t do in InDesign or Illustrator)
I selected all the guides in the Guides palette, and clicked on the palette menu to select Copy Guides.

The Guides palette menu.

I then selected the second page in the Guides panel, and selected Paste from the palette menu. I selected all the Guides on the second page and clicked on the palette menu to select Mirror Guides.

I now had the same guides I had on the first page, on the second page, and flipped horizontally. This saved me a ton of time trying to figure out the math that would make this work.

The guides are mirrored on the new page.

Finally, guides have a fully powered home in QuarkXPress 8! No longer do you have to let the former tedium of adding and removing guides dictate the amount of time you spend making sure things are aligned. Guide your way into the future with QuarkXPress 8!

There are many ways to learn how to use these features, including David Blatner’s Real World QuarkXPress 7.

CreativePro.com has an excerpt from the book that shows you how to synchronize and unsychronize content, and how to create and edit composition zones. It’s definitely worth a look.

Now, because of the changes Quark made to QuarkXPress 8, it’s much more likely that designers will discover these Pen tools and forego a trip to Adobe Illustrator. The tools are now featured in a prominent place in the Tools palette, and they now behave the same way as the equivalent tools do in Illustrator.

While Quark’s Bézier tools aren’t designed to replace the other design applications you rely on, they are powerful enough to easily create complex vector-based objects, saving you the time and trouble of switching applications just to create them. More complex designs will likely still require Illustrator, but the vast majority of common objects can be created right inside QuarkXPress.

The Bézier tool set includes Add and Remove point tools, along with Convert Point, Scissors, Select Point, and Freehand Drawing tools. It also includes straight and curved line segments, and symmetrical, smooth and corner points. Point and line segments can be changed once they are created, so you don’t have to worry if you start a line or shape with corner points when you really wanted smooth points instead.

In fact, you can use these tools to customize the shapes of letters: just convert your text to picture boxes by choosing Item> Convert to Boxes. You can then tug and pull on the shapes to make them fit your vision.

To create a line, start by selecting the Add Point Bézier tool, and then click where you want the points on your line to appear. Double-clicking ends the line, and Double-clicking on the starting point creates a closed shape. The Add Point Bézier tool is smart, too. Clicking on an already created line adds a new point, and clicking on an existing point removes it — no special keyboard combination’s required.

Need to change the properties of a point or line segment? Use the Select Point tool to grab the part you want to modify, and go to the Classic tab in the Measurements Palette to make the changes.

Just like Illustrator, you can grab segments to move them. Anchor points have handles so you can change corner angles and arcs; shapes can be scaled and rotated; and you can fill shapes with colors or even with other objects. If this sounds a lot like the way Adobe Illustrator works, that’s because it is.

Integration With Adobe Illustrator

Before you dump Illustrator for QuarkXPress 8’s Bézier tools, however, be sure to find out what the output requirements are for your project. Some print providers, especially in the screen printing market, require Illustrator-native files and won’t be pleased to receive QuarkXPress documents.

The good news is that if you export your file to EPS or PDF format, it can be opened by Illustrator with full vector editability maintained, so anyone with Illustrator can convert and use your vector drawing. Just use the new Export button at the bottom left of your project window:

QuarkXPress 8’s Bézier tools are especially powerful because the perform they way you expect, but they aren’t bogged down with overly complex features. They may not keep you from launching Adobe Illustrator, but they will cut down on the time you spend there.

Flash support in QuarkXPress 8 feels like an integrated design component just as it should, and not like some bolted on module or poorly designed XTension. Quark even made sure that version 8’s new typographic features are supported, which goes a long way towards keeping the look of your print and Web layouts in sync. Thanks to its interactive features, animation support, and support for embedded media files, QuarkXPress 8 is a full fledged player in the Flash market, and not a hobbled content creation tool.

Converting an existing layout for Flash is a simple process: Just Control-click the Layout tab in your current project and choose Duplicate.

Give the duplicate layout a new name, and choose Interactive from the Layout Type pop-up menu.

The Interactive palette sits at the heart of QuarkXPress 8’s Flash controls, and it’s likely where you’ll spend a substantial amount of your time since the hard part — creating your layout — is already done. The palette lets you assign attributes, like button actions or displaying .flv videos, to the objects in your layout.

The Interactive palette handles all the heavy lifting that goes along with building interactive menus, animating objects on a page, linking to other pages in a layout, running scripts, and collecting information from forms.

It creates the necessary code on the fly so you don’t have to. Translation: Anyone that can layout a document and select options from a palette can create Flash-driven content from Web pages to presentations to banner ads, which means anyone that’s comfortable using QuarkXPress.

QuarkXPress is flexible with the output options for your interactive documents, too. The content you create can be embedded in HTML pages, exported as SWF, or as stand-alone Flash applications, which covers pretty much all of the environments where Flash content shows up.

Despite all of the power behind QuarkXPress 8’s interactive features, there are some limitations. These features are not intended to replace professional Web design applications like Adobe Dreamweaver, but to instead act as a supplement. Layout and content changes you make in Interactive layouts do not appear in the original document layout, and there isn’t an auto-upload option to push Flash content out to Web servers.

Those limitations don’t, however, mean that QuarkXPress 8 isn’t a viable option for Flash content creation. It’s a great tool for graphic designers that need to keep control over layout elements or want to create cross-media content quickly.

Web coders are often expected to be graphic designers, and graphic designers are usually expected to be Web coders, too. Yet more often than not, both are comfortable only with their part of the media spectrum. QuarkXPress 8 bridges the divide between the two and places a powerful set of Flash design tools squarely in the hands of graphic designers, potentially saving time and money while empowering creative pros with the tools they need to create interactive content without starting from scratch.

“If you’re reading this article, chances are that you want one of two things from QuarkXPress: either to export final web pages that look just like what you see in XPress, or to export your content (text and perhaps graphics) so you can use it in another Web design program.”

And why you’d want to use XPress to make Web pages:

“So what’s the advantage of using QuarkXPress? First, you can design your web page using the familiar Text Box and Picture Box tools, and moving the boxes around to your liking. You can even preview the page in a browser before exporting to make sure that your design displays properly. Second, you can easily convert existing XPress content to a web document.”

And also why this workflow makes sense:

“So why did Quark put all that time and energy into adding so many web tools? For a simple reason: Too many customers were mocking up web page designs using QuarkXPress, Illustrator, and Photoshop, and then printing out the designs and telling web folks to re-create the whole thing using other tools. It’s a sadly common workflow, and it’s incredibly inefficient.”

They explain why this is more efficient, and recommend a different workflow:

“The web tools in QuarkXPress let you cut out a major step in the process because you can quickly build a mockup of a web page or web site using the XPress tools you already know how to use, and the web folks can use your work as a first draft. Sure, you can build a finished web page or a web site in XPress, but in most cases you’ll want to tweak your results in a more sophisticated program, such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive.”

They even discuss an excellent XTension that adds even more power to Quark’s ability to produce Web pages from existing documents:

“Gluon’s WebXPress… lets you do things that QuarkXPress can’t do by itself. For instance, export all your text and graphics from a regular XPress document, without reformatting it as a web document. More importantly, it can export all your stories and graphics as linear HTML, without page geometry. It offers a number of other cool features, such as XML, eBook format, and Palm HTML export. It also can create a web page with a Table of Contents page.”

I can testify to the power and utility of WebXPress. The folks at Gluon are among the best at creating XTensions that save tons of time, and if you have a long document (or lots of short ones) that simply need to be converted to HTML with navigation buttons, WebXPress is an excellent choice.