By Cyndie Shaffstall

Selection of text in QuarkXPress is limited to contiguous text, right? Wrong. Selection is limited only by the box you can draw. With Meadows Publishing Solutions' Grabber XTensions, you need to learn to think inside the box.

The Grabber XTensions from Meadows Publishing Solutions offer four workflow solutions, each based on the marquee tool. Using these products and an easy-to-draw marquee selection of any area of a page — including vertically and even across multiple text boxes — you can:

• reapply character attribute changes quickly to text in different locations
• style text very quickly in columns, across multiple boxes, and in different locations or projects
• nudge the tab position, change the alignment, and modify the fill character
• reapply adjustments quickly to tabs in different locations
• adjust tabs very quickly in columns, in multiple boxes in a single operation, and in multiple locations.
• perform spreadsheet-like calculations on numerical text
• specify the precision, rounding, and separators for mathematical results
• reapply a calculation very quickly to numeric text in different locations
• cut or copy the text in the selection, and then paste the copied text in place into another location
• move a column of text in tabular content
• delete text very quickly in different locations, even in different projects
• remove or set a bullet, or other hanging indent text, that is located at the beginning of each line in a series

Figure 1 Once you have installed one or more of the Grabber tools, you'll find they've been added to the bottom of the tools palette.

Text Grabber

Text Grabber	Text Grabber

Problem: You have text for which you need to change the formatting or style sheet, but it's discontinguous, or there's other text in the way. Take a look at figure 2. The part number and the price are in flush right tabs, so there's no way to select them both without also selecting the product name. Unfortunately, I need both bits of text to be violet.

Solution: Text Grabber enables you to draw a marquee around text to change character attributes in any area on a page, including vertically (as shown here) or even across multiple text boxes. Additionally, Text Grabber offers two ways to change the attributes of the text in the marquee selection: by applying individual attributes or by applying style sheets.

Figure 2 Once you have marqueed an area with the Text Grabber tool, you prompt the Text Grabber dialogue box.

Marquee and Change Text Attributes

You can use Text Grabber to change local character attributes without changing the selection's character style sheet assignments. The local attribute changes will override the settings that have been applied to the selected text. The selection's assigned character style sheets will not be changed or replaced.

Follow the steps below to change character attributes in a marquee selection of any area on a page:

Select the Text Grabber marquee tool.

 

Drag the Text Grabber marquee tool across the text that you wish to modify. Use the same process as you would use to draw a text or picture box — just click and drag.

Click the character attributes button and then specific text formatting or the style sheets button to select a predefined style sheet.

Click the apply button to preview the changes.

 

Click OK to accept the changes.

 

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