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QuarkXPress 8: A suite response

Dropping In

I've touched on drag-and-drop features already, but I'll detail the topic here. (I told you I'd get to it.)

Dan Logan has described many of the new features as "finally." You know, as in "Quark finally added these." That's especially true of drag and drop. You can finally drag text or pictures from the OS or from other applications and drop them into QuarkXPress 8.

Drag and drop is a splinter of the import feature, so if you can import the content, you can drag and drop it. What's important to remember is that the import dialogue box settings will affect what you drag and drop. For instance, for this magazine we have a template with style sheets predefined in a Word document. QuarkXPress has a Word filter that enables me to import this text with full support for the style sheets that were created in the word-processing application. QuarkXPress style sheets (of the same name and predefined in our QuarkXPress template) are automatically applied during the import routine. When I import this pre-styled text, I check the box to include style sheets and convert quotes. The first time I do this (for each session), those settings become the default and, unless I change them, each subsequent import will be guided by the same settings. This applies to drag and drop as well, and also applies to the drag and drop of pictures.

Figure 37 The drag-and-drop features are controlled by the settings of the import dialogue box. These settings are sticky and are remembered through each session of QuarkXPress 8.

The benefits of using drag and drop rather than the import dialogue is, of course, that's it's much less effort, but also that you can drag and drop multiple files (you can only import one file at a time).

When you drag and drop content from the OS level or from another application, QuarkXPress 8 displays box-targeting feedback. This is a blue-glow box outline that surrounds the target placement. If you drag over an existing box (of any content type), the blue highlighting surrounds the target box. If you drag to an open area of the layout, the highlighting surrounds the entire visible page and pasteboard area.

Figure 38 When you use the drag-and-drop feature, a blue box provides target feedback. The content in this case is text and it will replace the numeral eight graphic.

If, for instance, you have a box that covers the entire area and you do not want to drop the new content into this existing box, you can create a new box to contain the content by holding the OPTION key as you drop the content.

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