QuarkXPress Integration with Adobe Creative Suite 3
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QuarkXPress 7 is full of magic, but if you've yet to explore the many new features of QuarkXPress 7, click here to read our first article on the topic: X-Ray Magazine v3n1: The Magic of QuarkXPress 7.

The main box tools are the rectangle text box tool (the square with the letter A in it) and the rectangle picture box tool (the square with the cross through it).

If you change your mind about what you want to put in the box, you can control + click or right + click on it and you’ll see a contextual menu for switching the content.

Once you have an item on the page, you interact with it using the item tool or content tool. In general, the content tool is the best tool to have active since it can do almost everything that the item tool can do. You’ll usually only need the item tool for dragging boxes around, or occasionally, it comes in handy when you want to change settings for a entire item such as a table.

If you are using the content tool, you can temporarily switch to the item tool by holding down the command or CTRL key. There are no commands for selecting tools by letter, as in the Adobe applications, however you can use Shift + F8 to toggle your main tools and command + option + tab or CTRL + Alt + Tab and Command + Option + Shift + Tab or CTRL + Alt + Shift + Tab for scrolling up and down the tool palette.

Another useful shortcut to know is that if you need to delete an entire object, command + K or CTRL + K will always get rid of the item, no matter what tool is active.

Of course empty items will only get you so far usually. To put content in, use the file > import picture or text command, command + E or CTRL + E.

QuarkXPress can import the same kinds of text and image files that InDesign can, including Photoshop PSD, PDF, Illustrator files saved as PDF, Excel® files, and for web work, SWF, AVI, MOV, PNG, and so on. For more details, see the sections on Photoshop, Flash, and Tables. Click here to return to the table of contents.

The measurements palette is the most useful palette for making your content look the way you want it to. It is tabbed to allow you to easily navigate the many options. It’s very easy to understand, and includes useful features such as generating a new color.

If you click on the color boxes in the measurement palette, you’ll see the top option is new. This allows you to apply a color to an object and save it to your color palette at the same time; meaning you don’t end up with dozens of hard­to­manage, unnamed colors in your job.

Other useful palettes are the page layout palette for managing pages and the XPert Pilot palette for previewing high­quality thumbnails of your job.

The color palette is used for some transparency effects.

In addition to composition zones, QuarkXPress 7 includes many other workgroup tools. To learn more, click here for the PDFs of X-Ray Magazine v4n3: Successful Synchronization, or X-Ray Magazine v5n1: Shared Content.

Shared content is used to create synchronized items, a little like symbols in Flash or Illustrator. (See the QuarkXPress help or PDF manual for more on Shared Content.)

Most palettes can be grouped together in a palette group. To add a palette to a group (or to split one off), right + click or CTRL + click on the title bar of an existing palette then choose from the drop­down menu. If you want to quickly hide an entire palette group you can double click the bar at the top of the palette group.

Graphics and full-resolution previews

Once you have imported a graphic into a picture box, you can manipulate it as you see fit. See the section on Photoshop for more advanced picture-manipulation features.

To resize the contents of an image at the same time as you resize the box itself, hold down the command or CTRL key as you drag.

To see in real time the effects of resizing the box and or the picture inside, click the control handle and hold down your mouse button until the cursor changes shape. This will give you live refresh.

By default, QuarkXPress displays images at low resolution, but you can switch to full resolution using item > preview resolution (also available in a context menu Ctrl + click or right + click).

You can select all items on a page (command + A or CTRL + A) and apply full-resolution previews to all selected images. If you want to speed up your QuarkXPress, you can temporarily hide all full-res previews using view > full res previews.

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