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QuarkXPress 8: A Suite Response

PUT A DENT IN IT

If your body copy design calls for a text indent at the start of the paragraph, you can now add an em space width in the first paragraph indent field as opposed to typing an em or en space character for the indent.

Figure 43 As a nice side benefit, when you use these percentages of an em to indent your paragraph and you later change the text point size, the indent is scaled as well.

Later, if you change the design of your style so that an indent is no longer desired, you will not have to search and replace to remove them all. Simply set the indent here to zero.

Visually enhanced

QuarkXPress 8 offers three new stylized effects for text: hanging punctuation, margin alignment (provides for a subtle visual sharpening of the column edges), and hanging drop caps (separately from margin controls). When done well, the reader is likely to be completely unaware of the use of these three effects as each lends itself toward improving the readability and fine-tuning text anomalies that may cause the reader pause — and if not the reader, then surely your fellow designer.

In this section, we'll take a closer look at the three options — to be used separately or in concert.

HANGING CHARACTERS

This new feature set gives you precise control over paragraph boundaries and supports fully hung punctuation marks (commas, periods, quote marks, and so on). You'll often see this style used in advertisements or large headlines.

The concepts

When referring to the paragraph edges, Quark settled on leading and trailing (each column of a text box has its own leading and trailing edge). This is in deference to the multiple language capabilities and possibilities of this version. In Roman text, the leading edge is the left and the trailing edge the right. In East Asian languages, the leading edge is the top and the trailing edge the bottom.

With that in mind, the hanging characters' functionality is based upon a structure: classes and sets. A class refers to the characters and the hang attributes. Within a class, there is a leading class, trailing class, and drop case class. A set refers to a container that holds classes. Within a set there is the ability to apply multiple classes to paragraphs.

Using this structure, a class is used to define what characters to hang and how much the characters will hang. Choose leading, trailing, or drop cap class to determine what edge they affect.

Once your classes are established, you can put them into any set (container) that you want. They can even be included in several containers. These containers are then applied to paragraphs. Quark has predefined a few for you and they can be found in the paragraph attributes dialogue box. Let's try this so you can see how it works. You should end up with results something like those shown in figure 44 a and b. If you wish to share your sets and classes, use the FILE > APPEND dialogue box.

Start a QuarkXPress project.

 

Draw a narrow text box.

 

Type text into the box beginning and ending with quote marks.

 

Select the text.

 

Open the paragraph attributes dialogue box.

 

Choose HANGING CHARACTER SET (drop-down menu) >
HANGING PUNCTUATION.

Figure 44 a and b This is a very simple example of a leading hanging quote mark. Notice that once the hanging punctuation option is applied, the leading quote mark has been indented out with the remaining text aligning neatly under the capital T.

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