Page 14
QuarkXPress 8: A Suite Response

BOX DRESSING

Remember the part where I talked about easier access? Take a look at this new option of the measurements palette. Do this:

Draw a rectangular box (any content type, with any tool).

 

Go to the measurements palette.

 

Click to choose from the CORNER ICON drop-down menu
(shown in figure 28).

Optionally type a corner radius value.

 

Figure 28 The corner shape and radius have been added to the measurements palette.

[Sadly, I discovered there's no ticker here. For me, the radius of my rounded corners is usually a visually chosen setting, so a ticker here would have been just as welcomed.]

BOXING IN YOUR INTENT

Another changed behavior, due to the change in the tool set, is what happens when you select the text content tool to draw a box. If you do this, when you release the mouse, you have a rectangular text box and you can (without changing tools) begin typing and text appears in the box.

To be clear, you are drawing a rectangular text box with the text content tool as opposed to the box tool (the box tool allows you to draw various-shaped boxes without predefined content).

Now, with the text box and the text content tool both selected (and text in that box), when you drag through the text, QuarkXPress does not expect that your intent is to draw another box (even though you drew the first box with this same tool), it expects that you want to select the text and edit it.

The key here is whether or not the text box is active. If it is active, QuarkXPress expects that your intent with the text content tool is to edit the text. If the box is not active, QuarkXPress expects that your intent is to draw another text box. ...with me? Okay, maybe not, but give it a couple tries and you'll start to see what I mean.

DUPLICATION SERVICES

It seems to me that with every new release, QuarkXPress morphs more and more into a one-stop application. First came the Bézier pen tool and QuarkXPress started behaving like a vector-drawing application, then came web layouts, and QuarkXPress became an HTML editor, then Quark Interactive Designer, and QuarkXPress became a multimedia and Flash-creation tool, so could they go from here? I'm glad you asked.

Taking cues from other applications, QuarkXPress 8 has adopted new item behaviors. My favorite? So simple — it's drag to duplicate. Here's how:

Select an item and keeping the mouse button down, begin dragging.

 

Before releasing the mouse, add OPTION (Mac) or ALT (Windows).

 

A duplicate item is created without affecting the position of the original.

Picture perfect

Check out figure 29. Nice box, huh? Wait, where's the box's bounding edges and why is my image all over the place? Well, welcome to another new feature. Now, when you have an image in the box, you get to view all the parts of the image; even the parts that do not fit into the box. This ghosted image is especially advantageous when you are trying to design a page and you need to see what you're missing — and position accordingly.

Figure 29 Place an image in a box and QuarkXPress 8 renders the entire image so that you can easily position it — and there are handles on everything for rotation, scaling, and positioning — even the parts of the image that are ghosted.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29

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