Making the Most of Your Effort: Shared Content
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Attribute Synchronization

Synchronizing attributes is just as easy, but it allows you to work with the attributes of the content as well. Let’s draw a new text box, type some text, and then synchronize the content too. This time though, let’s name the item New Hello World and then select content & attributes option in the shared item properties dialogue box. See figure 5.

Figure 5 Here we are going through the same process, but instead we are choosing content & attributes.

Draw a new text box below and drag the new hello world item out of the palette and into the new text box. Now change the text in either of the text boxes to a different font or a different font size, or any other attribute change. You will see the change applied to the content of both boxes. See figure 6.

Figure 6 Here we have created two new synchronized boxes that have attribute synchronization applied. Any changes we make
to the content will happen in both boxes.

Box Synchronization

After doing this synchronization process twice, you have probably noticed the ability to synchronize box attributes. Having the option to synchronize box attributes means that you can keep placed boxes consistent too. Let’s do a quick box-only synchronization just for the fun of it.

Draw a text box on the QuarkXPress page and give it a cyan background. Next, click the new item synchronize button in the shared content palette. Finally, select the synchronize box attributes check box and uncheck the synchronize content check box. This will result in synchronization where only the box attributes are tracked. See figure 7.

Figure 7 All we’ve done here is simply synchronized the box.

Now here’s a cool tip. Since we’ve synchronized only the box, we don’t have to create a second box to synchronize with. All we need to do is drag the newly created item onto the page. In my example, I named my new synchronized item Text Box Sync. Drag and drop this synchronized item from the shared content palette directly onto the page.

To really show this correctly, we should do a few things to the box. In the first synchronize box, type, “Hi X-Ray”. You’ll notice nothing happens in the second box that you just dragged. However, change the size of either box, change the background, or even change the text inset and you’ll see the changes occur (see figure 8).

Figure 8 With box synchronization, we are synchronizing only the attributes of the box.

You certainly have the ability to synchronize content and content and attributes while also synchronizing boxes. I showed them separately so that you can see the effects more clearly. Using different combinations of these synchronize options can result in a high degree of flexibility in your designs.

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