X-Ray Magazine QuarkXPress Integration with Adobe Creative Suite 3

QuarkXPress Integration with Adobe Creative Suite 3
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PDF output styles

QuarkXPress 7 supports JDF specifications, job jackets, and output styles. Learn more in X-Ray Magazine v3n2: QuarkXPress 7 Adopts and Defines its use of JDF Specifications.

QuarkXPress 7.3 also provides some new default PDF output styles, allowing you to output PDFs without having to set anything up. These include Press – High Quality/High Resolution; Print – Medium Quality/Medium Resolution; Screen – Medium Quality/Low Resolution; Screen – Low Quality/Low Resolution; and PDF/X1a: 2001; and PDF/X3:2002.

You’ll also find these settings and more at our resource site. (See the Links section at the close of this article.)

To make your own settings, go to edit > output styles. You can also duplicate and modify existing output styles using this same method.

QuarkXPress can’t input Acrobat® PDF presets files directly, but you’ll find most of the same settings available to reproduce them.

Our PDF engine uses terminology that can be a bit confusing for diehard Acrobat users. We use the term compression where Adobe uses the opposite term quality. So QuarkXPress' high compression is Adobe's low quality. This is the setting to use when you value small file size over everything else. Studying the settings that ship with QuarkXPress 7.3 is a good way to get familiar with the best way to use PDF settings.

Using the settings is easy. When you go to file > export > layout as PDF you’ll see a PDF styles dropdown menu. Simply pick your style there.

If this job has special considerations, or if you want to edit some metadata, click on the options button.

Importing PDF

QuarkXPress 7.3 can import PDF files up to version 1.5.

The default PDF version from the Creative Suite applications when using the press quality PDF setting is PDF 1.4, but if you do receive a PDF that’s version 1.6 or 1.7, you will need to downsave it in Adobe Acrobat before import.

To import a PDF, just use import picture in a picture box, as with any other graphics format.

QuarkXPress for Adobe InDesign Users

Perhaps you cut your teeth on the Creative Suite’s bundled page-layout application, InDesign®, and now you’d like to bring your design skills over to QuarkXPress 7. There’s a lot of common ground between the two, although both have their unique features.

They also have slightly different terminology, shortcuts, and approaches to solving problems. By reading the previous sections, you should have a good grasp on things such as graphics import and crossmedia design. Below is a quick guide to the nuts and bolts of QuarkXPress for those who are more familiar with InDesign.

The basics

You’ll find a lot of the basics are the same between the two applications. The key differences are probably that QuarkXPress uses fewer tools than InDesign for basic tasks, and that it requires you to create a box (what InDesign calls a frame) before putting any content on the page.

The following is a quick run-down of how to create a basic page, with notes on the differences between the two applications as we go along.

Create a new project using file > new. Note that QuarkXPress files are called projects. That’s because QuarkXPress files can contain multiple layouts representing each piece in a campaign, for example. So a single project could have a layout for a letterhead, one for a business card, one for a Flash ad — all with unified styles, colors, preflight rules, and so on. Choose the new project settings.

If you have the XPert PageSets XTensions loaded (an XTensions module that is part of the free Quark XPert Tools Pro), you’ll get a dialogue box that allows you even greater control over the settings of a print layout and that also lets you save a preset using the style menu, much like InDesign.

If you are going to work on a web or interactive layout, you’ll access a different dialogue box. See the sections on Flash and Dreamweaver in this article for more details.

To add other layouts to your project later, like in the scenario described above, you’ll use the Layout menu.

Now let’s take a second to look at your key palettes. (If you can’t see a particular palette, you’ll activate it in the window menu.)

The first palette to note is the tool palette (F8 is its keyboard shortcut.) It’s very similar to the one in InDesign.

QuarkXPress mainly works with two kinds of boxes, picture and text. In addition to boxes, it has paths for drawing lines or running text on a path.

Before you put anything on the page, you have to draw a box. This is an additional step over InDesign, but it does have the benefit that you rarely place content in the wrong spot or have to resize massive graphics that spill off your page.

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