PreferencesAfter launching XPress, determining your preferences (under the QuarkXPress menu) before you actually open a new document will become the defaults for the program. If you forget to do this before you start, the Preferences panels are always available from the QuarkXPress menu and the changes you make will only apply to the current document. I haven’t covered all the preferences panels here, or all the features of the panels that are explained. I’ve included the information that is most basic to functioning efficiently in XPress as a page layout program, not a web page creation program. If you want a more thorough explanation of a panel, The Quark XPress Bible by Galen Gruman and Barbara Assadi is an excellent resource. It’s well worth the $45.00 investment.
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Application PreferencesGuide Colors: Margin Guides are set up when you create a new document and indicate the top, bottom, left and right margins for your page. Ruler Guides are dragged to the work area from the ruler, and dragged back again when you don’t need them anymore. The baseline grid feature, when visible, is a series of horizontal lines. Set the spacing for the baseline grid feature under the Print Layout portion of the Preferences panel. Display: If you have more than one monitor hooked up, you can have multiple projects open and visible on different monitors (choose Window > tile projects). Checking Full-screen Documents creates a wider document window. You may need to move your toolbox down a bit to get to the window’s close button when this is selected. Opaque Text Box Editing controls how a text box looks when you are dealing with text. By default, text boxes are “clear” (hurray for this change!). This can be disconcerting when pictures and text overlap—an opaque box for editing purposes temporarily hides any overlapping objects. Color and Gray TIFFs controls how images are displayed on your monitor. Choosing a lower bit setting or fewer gray levels will result in crummy-looking images in your document, and make your file smaller. Using the higher settings renders images better on-screen. Either way, your images will print to the quality of the original, and are not affected by these settings. The pasteboard is the white space on either side of you document pages. Use it to save objects until you are ready to use them. Objects on the pasteboard do not print. Setting the width to less than 100% decreases the amount of white space on either side of your document pages.
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Interactive Preferences Scrolling refers to how fast or slow your document passes in front of you when using the scroll bars, or the Option key shortcut, Live scrolling redraws everything on you page as it whizzes by. Speed scroll, on the other hand, just gets you where you (think) you want to go a lot faster. Checking both is OK. Most text you’ll be dealing with will probably use the “ and ‘ marks as quotes and apostrophes rather than inch and foot marks. Selecting Smart Quoteswill use quote marks and apostrophes instead on inch and foot marks by default (very nice). If you need an occasional foot or inch mark, type control + ‘ for feet, and control + shift + ‘ for inches. Delayed Item Dragging is a feature similar to live scroll where when you change the size of an object you can see in real time how the text shifts from one linked box to another, or how large/small your image will become. The smaller the delay time, the faster this feature kicks in. Page Range Separators determine what mark you need to use when printing. If you want to print the first 3 pages of your document, you would type 1-3 in the “page range” portion of the print dialog box. If you wanted non-sequential pages, you would type the page numbers you wanted using a comma between each (3,5,8,10). The control key is the at the bottom and to the far left or right of your keyboard. Some time back, the Mac OS created a new thing where pressing the control key activated a “contextual” menu. But in XPress, the control key has always been used as the shortcut for the zoom tool. I prefer to keep it this way, since I rarely use the contextual menu feature. Drag and Drop Text is a funky feature that lets you select text and then drag it to a different place. This can be faster than cutting and pasting, but it’s also frustrating at times.
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Save Preferences Auto Save interrupts your flow by saving your work automatically, according to the schedule you set here. If things crash a lot, you might want to check this. I prefer to save manually (command S) every time I finish a significant step in my design. Auto Backup can really clog up your
hard drive or disk. If you’re afraid you may need to revert to
an earlier version of a documents, you should check this. Then again,
you can always use the “save as” command to do the same
thing. |
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Undo Preferences Hooray for this one! Finally, you can have multiple undos in XPress, as well as redos. (History refers to how may actions XPress will remember at one time—in this case, the 21st action will replace the first action.
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File List Preferences A new feature in OS X software is “open recent” under the file menu. This panel allows you to set the number of files “recent” means, and Show Full Path shows you where that document is saved. Append Files to File Menu adds the files at the bottom of the menu, and Append to Open adds them to the Open command (tiresome). Alphabetize Names means the list will be displayed in alphabetical order. If you uncheck this, the list is ordered chronologically. Show Full Path adds the location of the file: i.e. desktop:folder:filename
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Default Path Preferences If you always save all your images in the same folder, all your text in another folder, all your XPress files in a third, and so on, you can browse to those folders here so when you open, save or “get” something XPress automatically goes to that folder. A nice idea in theory, but my guess is that you save your projects in separate folders (like “yamaha campaign” and “clorox ads”). And if you’re not, you should be!
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Jabberwocky Preferences This is a neat new feature in XPress.. When you don’t have the actual text you’ll be using in an ad or brochure, you can use Utilities > Jabber feature to create dummy text (which used to be called “lorem ipsem”). Latin is a good choice since no one will try to read it.
Above is an example of latin prose jabberwocky (also known as "lorem ipsem." |
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PDF Preferences Many service bureaus and printers prefer to get a PDF file on disk for output rather than an XPress file with all the images and fonts used in it. This panel lets you determine how to handle the Export as PDF option under the File menu. If you don’t choose “direct to PDF” you can save the file to distill in Adobe Acrobat. The “watched” folder is where you’d save your files to distill later. |
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General Preferences Greeking text and pictures allows XPress to work faster and more efficiently. The defaults (shown here) are fine for most projects. I’m most comfortable with my guides in front—if you select “behind” they disappear behind images and opaque text boxes. Snap Distance is how many pixels away from a guide your item needs to be before XPress takes over and pulls that item to the guide. "Snap to guides" is available to turn on or off under the Page menu. Master Page Items are objects you put on master pages that appear on all the pages in your document.. Make sure you “keep changes” since selecting “delete changes” may eliminate content that’s already in your document. Auto Picture Import is about updating images that have been modified since they were originally placed in a layout. The “on” option automatically updates the images, the “verify” option asks you if you want to update them, and “off” means you have to update things manually using the Utilities > usage option. Framing indicates whether the borders you place around text and images will go to the inside of the box you draw, or to the outside. Auto Page Insertion allows you to determine whether and where extra pages will insert automatically—valuable if you have lengthy text to place, and it usually only works if you have an automatic text box attached to your document. If you’re working on a single page ad, this can be extremely annoying. Auto Constrain works like the "constrain" command under the Item menu, but it automatically creates a parent box—as defined by any other boxes placed on top of it—instead of waiting for you to choose the command.
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Measurements Preferences Horizontal & Vertical measure indicate the unit of measure in each direction (i.e. rulers). There are 72 points per inch. And, while I don't use ciceros, I'm going to guess the default here is correct also. Item Coordinates lets you measure one page at a time, or pages as double page spreads— 17" across.
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 Paragraph Preferences
Setting up parameters for how your paragraphs will be formatted is available under the "paragraph" tab in the preferences window. Typically, the default preferences are the ones you want. You can change the auto leading amount here or with your style sheets, although we never use “auto leading,” If you use the baseline grid for aligning objects, make sure the increment you set is the same as the leading you’re using, otherwise things won't line up. (Using additional space between paragraphs can also present problems.
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Character Preferences The character tab is available for you to make sophisticated typesetting adjustments that become the default when you are using super- and sub-script characters, and small caps. A ligature is typically two letters that have been created as one—typical ligatures include "ff," "fl," and others where negative kerning is desirable. Kerning adjusts letter spacing. This option lets you select at which point size XPress should not kern. Auto Kerning is determined by any special “kerning pairs” built into the font you’re using.
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Layers Preferences Layers are new in XPress and I am so excited to have them. How they work can be established in this panel, or by double clicking a layer in the layers palette. Keep Runaround means that if you have a runaround on a laye, the text will still runaround that item on every other layer. You can change these settings within a document by double clicking on a layer in the layers palette. |
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