Quark XPress preferences control the way you work in the program, and are other preferences that you can set to determing the look of your elements—text, paragraphs, colors, and so on.

Paragraph Style

Paragraph format attributes deal with paragraph styling including indents, leading, tabs, and rule lines. Open this dialog box from the Style menu (command shift F).

The general tab lets you name a paragraph style, and base it on another one that may exist. You can also assign an Fkey shortcut to a style here.

The formats tab gives you options for how the paragraph actually looks.

Left Indent refers to the left edge of your text box. If you set it to greater than 0, the text will bounce to the right of the left edge.

First Line is where you would specify a paragraph indent: if you want an indent, set it here: do not use the tab key or the space bar!

Right Indent sets the right margin of your text in relation to the edge of the text box.

Leadingadds (or removes) white space between lines of type.

A Space Before measurement adds white space before a new paragraph

The Space Aftermeasurements adds white space after a new paragraph.

NOTE: choose either space before or space after, not both!

Drop Caps create larger capital letters at the beginning of a paragraph.

Keep Lines Togetherprevents paragraphs from splitting into multiple columns. Choosing the “start” and “end” option will prevent orphans.

Keep with Next ¶ is a good choice when formatting subheads: it prevents the subhead from being separated from the following paragraph.

Character Style

To change the way type looks in specific instances, use the character attributes dialog box from the Style menu (command shift D).

Here you can choose your font from the pop-up menu, the point size, and color.

If you want a tint of a color, rather than 100%, select a shade, or type in the percentage.

Horizontal and vertical scale distort your letters by either expanding or condensing their width without changing their height (horizontal scale), or making them shorter or taller without changing their width (vertical scale). Use with caution!

Don't use horizontal or vertical scale if you can help it. It you must, don't distort it more than 10% in any direction.

Lists

The new list feature in v.6 provides the opportunity to create a table of contents, for instance, in a long document.

The process for creating a list includes creating style sheets for your list items first, then creating the list itself (from the Edit menu) using those styles to establish which text in your document gets included in the list. Finally, select an empty text box, and choose “build” from the List window (Window > show lists).

Dashes and Stripes

There are eleven different styles of stripes included in XPress. Once you’ve drawn a line, you can use either the Style menu or the measurements palette to apply a style and thickness, and whether you want arrows at one or both ends. Use the color palette to assign a color other than the default black.

Some of the line styles, especially those that have two or more lines, need to have a width of at least 2 points before they’ll really show up.

To edit or create a new dash or stripe, select Dashes and Stripes from the Edit menu.

Selecting "edit" or "create new" pulls up a funky window that allows you to specify the thickness and position of lines, or the shape and spacing of dashes.

In the example to the right, three stripes were created by typing a position in terms of percent (30%) and then clicking the add button. Once you’ve added a stripe, you can adjust its position and thickness in the upper window.

Selecting a miter style affects the corners if the style is applied as a border around a text or picture box.

Create new stripe styles using the dashes and stripes dialog box from the Edit menu.

STYLE SHEETS

Style sheets are preset styles for both characters and paragraphs.

By default, all XPress documents have a "normal" paragraph style, and a "normal" character style.

You can change what "normal" looks like as well as create additional styles using Style Sheets from the Edit menu.

Choose either a new paragraph style or character style from the "new" pop-up menu. This brings up a slightly modified version of the paragraph or character style dialog box.

Once you've edited a style or created a new one, click "save." At this point, you can apply the style to selected type in one of three ways:

Select the style from the Style menu: Style -> Character Style Sheet, or Style -> Paragraph Style Sheet.

Press the Fkey you assigned as a shortcut.

Use the style palette: open it from the Window menu.

The advantage of creating styles is that you can format a document quickly by selecting type and assigning the style, rather than having to open the character or paragraph style sheets from the Style menu every time you want to make a change.

style sheet palette