QuarkXPress For Dummies. Nelson Jay J.

❯❯ Layout controls: The Layout controls attached to the bottom left of your project window let you change the view percentage of your project, navigate to other pages within it, and print or export that layout, as shown in Figure 2-2.

       FIGURE 2-2: The Project interface controls.

      Marching through the Menus

      The original Macintosh interface (and later, Windows) was designed to accommodate a very small display. (The original Macs had a 9-inch display, and a 13-inch display was state of the art for years after that.) To get the interface out of the way so that you had space to work in, all the commands were tucked into the menu bar at the top of the display. The menu items that people used most were given a keyboard shortcut, and that tradition continues to this day.

      In the sections that follow, I briefly explain the purpose of each menu and highlight a few of the menu items it contains. You can explore the other menu items later in the book as they apply to appropriate topics – otherwise, this section would be completely overwhelming!

      

Pay attention to the keyboard shortcuts for commands that you use frequently, and memorize them if you can. The less you have to use the mouse, the more productive you’ll be! I include a handy list of QuarkXPress’s most popular keyboard shortcuts on this book’s Cheat Sheet (go online to www.Dummies.com and search QuarkXPress For Dummies Cheat Sheet), but if your favorite menu item lacks a shortcut (and you’re using a Mac), you can assign your own: Choose QuarkXPress ⇒ Preferences and scroll down to Key Shortcuts.

The QuarkXPress menu

      Application-level information such as your license code is here, along with application-level controls such as Quark Update settings and hiding or quitting the app. On a Mac, the all-powerful Preferences are here, too. (On Windows, Preferences is in the Edit menu.)

The File menu

      File-level controls such as Open, Print, Save, and Close reside in this menu. The File menu is also where you go to create new projects or libraries, import text or graphics, append colors and style sheets from other projects, export text, layouts or pages to other formats, collect linked files for output, and use Job Jackets. (I explain Job Jackets in Chapter 7.)

      

The File menu includes a Revert to Saved menu item, which you can use for creative explorations. First, save your document; then make some changes you may or may not like to keep. If you hate, hate, hate the result, choose File ⇒ Revert to Saved, and your project goes back to how it looked when you last saved it.

The Edit menu

      This very long menu hosts options to cut, copy and paste items, find and change text or page items, define repeatedly used resources such as colors, style sheets, hyperlinks, lists, color management, output styles (collections of output settings), and play with some wonderfully esoteric font controls. On Windows, the all-powerful Preferences controls are here, too. (On a Mac, Preferences is in the QuarkXPress menu.)

The Style menu

      Most of the items in this menu are also available in QuarkXPress palettes. (See the section “Mastering palettes,” later in this chapter, for a detailed explanation of palettes.) The Style menu holds font style controls, picture box formats and controls, item styles, cross references, and hyperlinks.

      

The items you see in the Style menu change, depending on what kind of page item is currently active. This feature is another way QuarkXPress tries to help you be more efficient. Most of these menu items are also available in various palettes.

The Item menu

      This menu gives you the power to make changes to an entire page item. (Page items include text boxes, picture boxes, lines, paths, and shared items such as Composition Zones.) You can duplicate the active item, delete it, lock it, group or align it with other items, and change its shape or content type. If you have a path selected, you can edit its segments or anchor points. You can convert editable text to picture boxes. This menu also lets you set up sharing and synchronization of items and their content, create nonprinting notes, and scale one or more items and control how their content and attributes are scaled. If you’re building an e-book from a complex layout, this is where you add text for reflowing.

      

QuarkXPress provides two different menu items to remove selected page items or text: Edit ⇒ Cut and Item ⇒ Delete. What’s the difference? Edit ⇒ Cut moves the item or text to your computer’s clipboard so that you can then choose Edit ⇒ Paste to paste that item somewhere else. However, the clipboard can hold only one item or chunk of text at a time. So what if you have some text on the clipboard and want to remove a page item – without losing the text on the clipboard? Choose Item ⇒ Delete instead! Also, even if you’re currently using the Text Content or Picture Content tool (instead of the Item tool), you can still click an item and use Item ⇒ Delete to remove it. Smart QuarkXPress users memorize the Command/Ctrl-K shortcut for Item ⇒ Delete. You can easily remember this command if you think of this: “Kill this item!”

The Page menu

      This one’s simple: Use the Page menu for inserting, deleting, or moving pages, for going directly to a page, or for displaying the Master page assigned to the current page. The Page menu is also where you create or edit a section, which is useful for controlling page numbering in a long document. If you’re working on setting up a Master page, this is where you access its margin guides, column guides, and gridlines.

The Layout menu

      Commands related to managing an entire, multipage layout are here, such as deleting an entire layout, duplicating it, or adding a new layout to the project. The Layout menu is also where you can change layout properties you set initially when you created the project, such as the layout’s name, page size, orientation, and output intent (print or digital). You can share your layout so that others can work on it, and create a new Layout Specification for Job Jackets. (Job Jackets are a collection of requirements and limitations for specific kinds of projects; they ensure that your layouts will output properly. I tell you more about Job Jackets in Chapter 7.) If you’re making an e-book, you can enter its metadata here and add the entire content of a layout to the reflow in the e-book. And last, in case you’re not fond of clicking the Layout tabs to switch to a different layout, you can choose a layout from a list, or switch to the previous, next, first, or last layout in the project.

The Table menu

      When you’re working with a table, you find all the ways to change it on this menu. You can select, insert, or delete rows and columns, select gridlines, combine cells, break the table into pieces, and create headers and footers. This menu is also where you convert tabbed text to a true table, convert a table into text boxes, and link text cells so that text flows from one to the other.

The View menu

      The View menu controls all aspects of what you see on your page and how you see it. Use this menu to control the view percentage, and how you see guides and grids, rulers, invisible characters, and item tags. You can turn on highlighting for content variables (text that is automatically created based on its location in the layout, such as running headers or footers) and cross references (as used in books), and edit text in a special Story Editor that’s like a word processor.

      Because QuarkXPress lets you extend items off the edge of the page (also known as a bleed), you can view your page as if the bleed were trimmed off. (A bleed is necessary when a page item extends to the edge of a printed page, because a commercial printer will print your page on larger paper and then trim off the excess – just in case the cutter isn’t accurate.) And because QuarkXPress lets you set any item to be suppressed when printing or exporting, you can hide any suppressed items. (A suppressed item appears in the layout but is not included when exporting