Real World QuarkXPress 7
Page 2

Real World QuarkXPress 7 for the Newbie

Maybe you're a student; maybe you're changing careers. Maybe you'd just like to make your work look a little more professional than the stuff your competition creates in Microsoft® Word®. Whatever the reason, if you're new to QuarkXPress, Real World QuarkXPress 7 is filled with loads of valuable information.

It's easy to be intimidated by an application the size of QuarkXPress, especially when the new menu leads to a submenu with four options, none that are the obvious choice to begin creating a new document. Fortunately, this book's first chapter, Learn QuarkXPress in 30 Minutes, leads you through the process of creating a document that makes use of most of the features that QuarkXPress users around the world rely on every day. There are few side-trips (even style sheets are relegated to a later chapter), and the chapter is easy to follow, so when you get to the end you'll have a skill set that, while rudimentary, is enough for you to be able to create documents that put Microsoft Word to shame. Chapter one also provides an introduction to the sometime bewildering world of output, drawing a clean line between layouts you can print yourself and layouts that you need to send to an output bureau.

Chapter two, QuarkXPress Basics, is more of a reference chapter than how-to, and is probably best read after you've finished the rest of the book, to make sure you don't miss any details.

The third chapter, Working with Items, begins with an in-depth explanation of the concepts of items and content — a key concept for working in QuarkXPress. From there, Chapter three describes the numerous item-creation tools and explains how to draw and manipulate boxes and lines (including Bézier boxes and text on a path). This chapter shows how to convert text to paths (great for creating text-shaped picture boxes), and covers the intricacies of grouping. There's a segment that explains how to automatically align items to each other and to the page, and treatises on layers, guides, libraries, and frames.

Chapter three is a long chapter, and you might not want to read all of it in one sitting. However, you should definitely read about the item and content tools and the different kinds of box tools. You'll do yourself a big favor if you familiarize yourself with the sections about grouping, alignment, and layers. All of these features can save you a world of time and effort if you understand how to use them before you start building layouts.

Speaking of layouts, Chapter four describes such key concepts as different layout types (print, web, and interactive), margin guides, and column guides. The second segment describes the much-misunderstood project/layout dichotomy; this bit is not of much use unless you intend to use the synchronized text feature, but it also describes the split windows feature, that is immensely useful when working in long documents. Next comes a description of master pages, that every QuarkXPress user would be wise to read carefully; used properly, master pages can transform the job of laying out a long document from tedium to a joy. The segment on spreads is of limited interest to the average user, but the parts on sections and page numbering are important to read.

The fifth chapter, Text, covers key activities such as text import/export and spell checking. This chapter should be required reading for any QuarkXPress user; if you combine chapter five with chapter seven, that describes the style sheets feature, you're already miles ahead of the average user. (If you've never investigated style sheets, now is the time — any style sheet user will be happy to tell you that this feature alone can cut your production time in half. Seriously.)

Chapter six, Typography, is where you really start to see what makes QuarkXPress the designer's choice. The beauty of QuarkXPress is that if you know about features such as drop caps, OpenType, kerning/tracking, baseline grid, and H&Js, you can do amazing things — but even if you don't, your text always looks like it knows what it's talking about.

Taking a look at Chapter ten, Pictures, is another good investment of your time. A good number of output problems are due to pictures, so if you can master picture import you'll save yourself a decent chunk of time. In this chapter, you can learn about importing pictures via file > import picture (a best practice) versus pasting pictures into boxes (a no no), and you can learn how to make sure that the picture you see in your layout is the same picture in the picture file (if it isn't, you're in trouble).

If you're a newbie, the chapters of Real World QuarkXPress 7 mentioned above are enough to put you far ahead of the pack. Rather than developing bad habits, you can learn now how to do things the smart way and save yourself hundreds of hours.

Next time, we'll talk about how Real World QuarkXPress 7 can help you make the most of your upgrade to QuarkXPress 7.

1 | 2 | PDF Version

If you enjoy our articles, click here to subscribe.
Free JavaScripts provided by The JavaScript Source