The Zen of Document Production
Page 2

Now, in case you’re thinking, “Why are they writing about this tired, old topic? What about opacity? Composition zones? Job Jackets?” Well, let me give you a little teaser. How often have you seen this scenario in figure 1? Nary a drop shadow in sight for QuarkXPress 7 to work on, but you’ll see boxes galore at left, leaving the mystery of how much space before/after the heads and a re-flow nightmare each time the text changes. The simple solution? A deep left indent on the body text plus paragraph and character style sheets for consistent headline, body text, and callout formatting. Nothing new, but a simple technique that enforces consistency and saves hours of manual adjustment over 20 pages.

Figure 1 At left, box madness. At right, smart indents.

Templates

The first task, with a job like this, is to see what’s going on in the QuarkXPress projects. These are pretty traditional projects, containing a single layout for one or two magazine articles with ads interspersed. After a quick inspection, the three things I was concerned about at the template level were: consistent preferences, useful master pages, and a streamlined colors list.

Preferences

The first thing I did is look at the preferences dialogue box in each layout (edit > preferences). In particular, I wanted the ligatures preferences to be the same. I increased the break above because the headline text is tracked out slightly but still looks better with ligatures. I also checked not ffi and ffl to prevent ligatures in words such as office and waffle. (Also, because I hate greeking, I unchecked Greek text below in the general panel, although this is a personal choice.)

Figure 2 Above and at left, this eight-page layout has 11 master pages — some that would never be used in this layout. At right, the streamlined page layout palette contains the only four master pages that make sense for this layout.

Master Page Inclusion

After making sure all the layouts had the same ligatures preferences, I moved on to master pages. Just what is in these layouts? As you can see in figure 2, a lot of master pages for not very many pages. While some of the master pages are there to accommodate possible ads, others are for other sections of the magazine entirely, and one is the default master page, A-Master A. At the least, if you’re not using the default master page, get rid of it. In this layout, I also deleted the master pages for two other sections of the magazine. The remaining master pages carry on amid less confusion. In this case, the master page names are fairly intuitive (ad left vs. left), so I left them alone. When finished, each layout for the magazine contained only the master pages it might possibly use. This not only prevents confusion but it makes the files smaller and requires fewer fonts for opening the layouts.

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