Composition Zones Continued
Page 6

Don’t be fooled by the new window; she’s still in the same project. She just has a new window that lets her concentrate on building the ad without having to look at the rest of the page.

Nancy creates the ad, and when she’s done, she closes the window she’s working in. Back in the host layout, she can see the ad she’s just built (see figure 14).

Figure 14 The ad for a new newspaper carrier that Nancy created in the composition layout.

Figure 15 Sharing the carrier ad.

Now, how does she put a copy of this ad on every page? She uses the new and improved QuarkXPress shared content feature. With the composition zone selected, she clicks shared content (palette) > share. A dialog box appears, allowing her to name the ad Carrier Ad and specify sharing options (see figure 15). To keep the ad in this project, she chooses availability > this project only (drop-down menu). To give herself easy access to the composition layout, she makes sure to check show tab in project window.

When Nancy closes this dialog box, the master version of the ad is placed in an invisible part of the project called the shared content library. (You can think of the shared content library as a sort of storage room for content that might be used in different places within the project’s layouts.) Because the ad is in the shared content library, it displays in the shared content palette (see figure 16).

From here on out, it’s a walk in the cake. Nancy simply drags an instance of the Carrier Ad composition zone out onto the page wherever she needs it. If she spots a typo in the phone number, all she has to do is right click on the text within the ad, choose edit, and make the change. All copies of the ad are updated.

So, what just happened? In essence, it's very similar to what happens with shared text in QuarkXPress 6. Except instead of just the text being synchronized, it's an entire ad.

 

Figure 16 The carrier ad in
the shared content palette.

External Composition Zones Designated as All Projects

We’ve already seen two examples of external all projects composition zones, when Eric exported composition zones for Nancy and Hannah to work on. In both cases, he created an external file that another person using a different copy of QuarkXPress could work on. The only difference was, in Nancy’s case, the files containing the exported composition layouts were stored in a mutually accessible location, so that Eric could see the results of her work as she did it.

In order for this kind of real-time updating to occur, the exported composition zone project must remain in the location where it was exported. However, if the file is moved, it’s no disaster; in this case, it just means that the host layout can’t be updated until the external file is returned to the export location. This is what happened when Eric sent the composition zone to Hannah for editing; he didn’t see the results of her changes until she sent the file back and he put it back into the export directory. Then his host layout was immediately updated.

 

Again, it can be helpful to think about external composition zone projects as similar to imported graphic files. Think of a QuarkXPress 6 document that uses imported pictures. If you make changes to those picture files, you can automatically update the QuarkXPress layout that uses them from the usage dialog box — but only if the picture is where QuarkXPress expects it to be. External composition zones work the same way: as long as QuarkXPress can find an exported composition zone project, it can update the host layout with the latest version of that composition zone.

One important difference: if you lose a picture file, you're out of luck, but if you lose an external composition layout file, you still have a fully editable backup copy stored in every layout that has a composition zone based on that composition layout.

Internal Composition Zones Designated as All Projects

What about shared internal composition zones? Let’s assume that Eric decides to include the carrier ad on the invoices they’ll be sending out in the next week. He could physically copy and paste the ad from the newspaper project to the invoice project, but what happens when the inevitable typo crops up? The composition zones feature will ensure that the typo is fixed throughout the paper, but how can Eric make sure it gets fixed on the invoice, too?

Here's how. First, Eric asks Nancy to set the availability of the ad to all projects in the newspaper project. Next, he opens the invoice layout and chooses file > collaboration setup to display the collaboration setup dialog box (see figure 19). This is the nerve center where you control a variety of collaborative functions, including shared composition zones.

Figure 19 The collaboration setup dialog box is the nerve center for linked layout and shared layouts.

Eric clicks the linked layouts (tab) > link layout. This gives him a dialog box that lets him navigate to the QuarkXPress project containing the carrier ad and link to that project — even if Nancy is currently working on the file.

When Eric clicks done, any internal composition zones designated as all projects in the newspaper project appear in his shared content palette, including the one for the carrier ad.

Now all Eric has to do is drag the ad from the shared contentpalette onto the invoice layout. If Nancy subsequently catches and fixes a typo, the typo is fixed both throughout the newspaper and on the invoice.

Figure 20 Anatomy of an internal composition zone designated as all projects. 1. When you link to another project, all of that project’s shared composition zones display in your shared content palette. 2. Once a composition zone appears in the shared content palette, you can drag it into the project's layouts.

You can link to external shared composition layouts as well as internal shared composition layouts. For example, let’s say Hannah writes a column that thoroughly ticks off half the town and sparks an angry letter-writing campaign. In response, Nancy prudently decides to run that column again in the next issue. How does she do it? Exactly the same way Eric reused the ad: she uses the collaboration setup dialog box to link to the external project containing Hannah’s column, and then drags the column from the shared content palette into the new edition’s layout.

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