The Zen of Document Production
Page 4

After deleting unused style sheets, I was still faced with fifteen mysteriously named style sheets — for example, "new deck replacment" — and not nearly enough style sheets for all the various text formatting options on the page. So I made a new paragraph style sheet for every option on the page, from top to bottom — headline, deck, body text no indent, body text indent, and more.

Figure 6 Create a new style sheet by clicking in formatted text and then choosing new from the style sheets palette’s contextual menu.

To make the style sheets I clicked in formatted text and control + clicked the style sheets palette to display a contextual menu, and then selected new as shown in figure 6. The paragraph style sheet names include numbers to create a hierarchy within the palette: 1 Headline, 2 Byline, 3 Body Text Indent, 3.1 Body Text No Indent, and so on. The keyboard shortcuts for the style sheets are synchronized to the numbers; for example, 3 Body Text Indent uses command + 3 and 3.1 Body Text No Indent uses command + option + 3. After creating the paragraph style sheets, I created character style sheets for any variations within text such as run-in subheads, bold, italics, color switches, and more. Commonly used character style sheets are assigned keyboard shortcuts as well.

Creating all new style sheets and coming up with a logical naming and keyboard shortcut strategy was time consuming, so I didn’t want to do it for each template. Once the base set of style sheets was complete (for headlines, body text, subheads, bylines, and the like), I deleted the style sheets in the other layouts and appended the new set. In some of the layouts, I created additional style sheets for special formatting needs and deleted style sheets from the base set that would not be used.

With the style sheets palette in particular, my goal was to create a template in which anyone could sit down and figure out how to format the text — and format it correctly. No need to remember whether the design calls for Garamond Italic or Garamond Light Italic or whether bold means book, bold, or ultra bold. Aside from changes such as color and kerning or tracking, I didn’t want to see any of those plus signs indicating local formatting. A style sheet for everything means no guesswork.

Tips & Tricks

Once the cleanup is complete, the fun can begin. So far, most of the document-construction tasks have consisted of deleting leftover junk in the templates, but some of these layouts offered some real QuarkXPress challenges. Two calendar sections, in particular, arrived with a bewildering bounty of boxes; boxes that needed to flow with text, and a lot of it. One problem I solved with anchored boxes, and the other with paragraph rules applied through a style sheet. Take a look.

Figure 7 Above, boxes galore are not conducive to text re-flow. Below, I converted items to no content where appropriate and then used a combination of style sheets, anchored boxes, and indents to achieve the same look. (Plus I cheated by hiding guides—whew!)

Related articles: Jonathan Ferman shares his favorite
tips and tricks for QuarkXPress 6.5 and QuarkXPress 7.

Anchored boxes

Although new to my graphic designer friend, QuarkXPress has been able to anchor boxes since as least version 3.0, if not earlier. When I first saw this calendar design, shown in figure 7, I had to quash the urge to cry — although maybe it was just the cacophony of guides hurting my eyes. A round picture box behind every date? Free floating headlines? Colored picture boxes behind the text? Yikes.

First, I converted the large picture boxes to no-content boxes by choosing item > content > none, solely to save my eyes from those big Xs. Next, I took a look at the heads for the months, which were nestled snugly in their own text boxes. For text-flow purposes, that simply will not do. So I figured out the space between the heads and the first calendar entry, and then created a paragraph style sheet.

Now, take a look at those bubbles containing the dates. No chance am I going to move the hundred or so bubbles manually every time the text re-flows in this layout, that is at least five times per issue. The first thing I want is for the bubble to actually contain the date, so I converted a round picture box to a text box and positioned the date within it. Then, I anchored the box in its own paragraph, right before the calendar entry’s text. Since the headlines and the bubbles are slightly offset to the left of the main calendar entry text, the calendar entry paragraphs have a left indent of .1”. The one remaining challenge here is how to get that bubble on every entry. I did that with copy and paste, inserting the date into each bubble after pasting it on each entry. Each month in the calendar has a different color bubble, so about halfway through, I switch to a different colored box. This solution still has a little manual work involved, but it’s a million times better than floating bubbles.

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