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QuarkXPress 8: A Suite Response

ACCESSIBLE BY NATURE

Starting in QuarkXPress 7, Quark started to migrate users from the large, modal dialogue boxes onto the non-modal palettes. This reduces or eliminates the need for a user to navigate through multiple menus or dialogue boxes when laying out a page.

With QuarkXPress 8, nearly all attributes from the modify dialogue box and character attributes dialogue box have made their way to the contextual measurements palette. As a context-sensitive palette — depending upon what you have selected — a different view of the measurements palette may be displayed. In figure 7, the first view is the classic mode when I have a picture selected and the second view, also the classic mode, when I have text selected.

Figure 7 There are many different context-sensitive panes within the measurements palette.

Also new is that all palettes are automatically activated. In previous versions of QuarkXPress, you would have to activate a text box in order to make changes within the style sheet palette or a box of some sort to activate the colors palette. Today, that need has been eliminated. You can enter — and make changes — to any palette, regardless of a selection, or the lack thereof.

For the most part, you will find that the control within the palettes includes all control that you would find in the corresponding dialogue box. There are a few exceptions, most notably may be filtering. In the colors palette, for instance, you are able to filter the color list by spot, process, multi-ink, colors in use, and colors not used. The same goes for the style sheets palette (character style sheets, paragraph style sheets, styles used, styles not used), and neither of these filtering options is included in the palettes.

When the new measurements palette popped up (as it were), I was completely thrilled and ready, willing, and able to give up my keyboard shortcuts that accessed dialogue boxes. Now with even more at my fingertips, it's my personal goal to stop the typing and start the clicking. QuarkXPress' new interface is designed to help us navigate the processes more logically and the palette interface certainly gives us every opportunity.

IT'S NOT WALL STREET

We were first introduced to the context-sensitive measurements palette in QuarkXPress 7, but it has undergone its fair share of enhancements in QuarkXPress 8. Ticker controls, by example, are new options that enable us to work more visually and less mathematically. [I'm certain I just heard a collective sigh of relief.] Let's take a look at an example of how ticker controls work.

For those of you who remember, there have always been ticker controls on both the leading and the kerning fields of the measurements palette. This meant that you could select text and adjust the leading in predefined increments by clicking the up and down arrows. You could do the same with kerning and tracking by clicking the left (less space) and right (more space) arrows. That function has now been extended to most of the options within the measurements palette.

Figure 8 Using the ticker features of the measurements palette, you can now visually test your selections.

One of the best examples of a difficult setting in the design-by-numbers scenario is drop-shadow blur. To choose the correct number on your first try here, you need to be some sort of mathematical phenom. For most of us, it's type a value and proof, type a value and proof; repeating the process until you get some semblance of a blur that you find acceptable. With the ticker interface, this is far simpler. Try this:

Draw a box.

 

Apply a drop shadow.

 

Click the ticker control to increase and decrease the blur amount.

 

Smile with satisfaction.

 

[Of course, the first thing I did was add a modifier key to see if I could get finer control from the ticker, and, well, no such luck. For the moment, we get the wonderful ability to design visually, but we have to wait for a more slight touch.]

One other note on this feature: Each ticker click is its own complete action and as such, when you choose undo, it will undo one click only, not revert to the original state.

We'll delve into the other additions to the measurements palette as we go along, but some of the highlights are: corner radius, WYSIWYG fonts list, and ticker control on inset values (oh, wow!).

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