How-To’s Day: Quark: How To Fill Text With A Picture

How would you make the below image? Photoshop? Illustrator? If you’re building your layout in QuarkXPress, why not just do it within Quark?

One of the biggest time-eaters in laying out a publication is jumping over to image-editing or drawing programs. Too often we think creating or tweaking simple effects like filling text with an image (or images) can only be done in Photoshop or Illustrator. Whenever possible, stay in your layout application. It will save time and frustration. It’s also easier to organize—one (or even more) less image to track down and copy when sending out the job or archiving.

The above was done entirely in Quark. In today’s How-To’s Day tutorial, I’ll tell you how:

Fill A Word With A Picture

1. Start a new print layout in QuarkXPress. I’m using QuarkXPress 6.01.

2. Create a text box and type your text. Keep it simple: This technique only works with a single line of text, and it looks much better when applied to short, bold words.

3. Set your text formatting, choose a thick, bold typeface at a large point size. For my “Tampa” design I used Thomas E. Harvey’s typeface Coliseum set at 250 pts. Leading doesn’t matter, but adjust the kerning, scaling, and other styling options until you have exactly the look you’re after.

4. Highlight your text with the Content Tool and select from the Style menu Text To Box. After that, you should now have a picture box, evident by the “X” through it, in the shape of your text. Above that will be your original text box.

5. With either the Item or Content Tools, select your new word-shaped picture box and goto File > Get Picture (or just press CMD+E (Mac) or CTRL+E (Win)).

6. Voila! Now you’ve got text filled with a picture. Adjust the image with the Content Tool until it fills your box, Right-Click and choose Fit Picture to Box from the context menu, Right-Click and choose Fit Box to Picture from the context menu, or use the Measurements Palette to align and size your fill image.

Since the text is now a standard picture box, you can manipulate it just like you would any other picture box. As you can see from the next photo, I stretched my filled text vertically to better accomodate the Tampa skyline photo.

Once you have this technique down, you’ll probably wonder if there’s a way to place a separate image inside each letter—without having to repeat the process for each letter individually. Of course there is!

Fill Each Character With A Separate Picture

1. Follow the above “Fill A Word With A Picture” procedure to create your text-shaped picture box. Go all the way through at least step 4 so you will have a filled text-shape.

2. Select the text-shaped picture box with the Item Tool and goto Item > Split > Outside Paths. Don’t choose All Paths or open areas like the counters of a’s, e’s, b’s, d’s, p’s, and so on will become separate objects unto themselves. This can provide even more creative options, but for now stick with Outside Paths.

3. Depending on your version of Quark and how fast it redraws your screen, you may or may not notice a change come over your text-shaped picture box. Rest assured, something fundamental has changed.

4. With the Item Tool still selected, click away from your picture box to deselect it, then click on a single letter and Get Picture. See how the new image is only in that letter? The same can be done for each of the letters in your word or phrase.

The Item > Split > Outside Paths command splits the compound picture box into its constituent parts, treating each as its own self-contained picture box. Thus each can hold its own image—or coloring or blend, for that matter. To manipulate the word as a whole again, just select all letters by dragging a rectangle across them with the Item Tool and choosing Item > Group.

Filling words with pictures can provide dramatic effect, but, like any other cool effect, it’s easily abused. Use this technique only when a project calls for it; don’t try to fit it into a project just to do it.

Broken link or moved resource? Let us know.

TAGS:  design howto quark indesign adobe graphics  

PAGE ID: 8928350835969126