QuarkXPress Tips

Trips, tricks, techniques, and short tutorials on all the tools integral to the modern design workflow to help get you through a deadline a little faster, more creatively, and with more fun.

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Break the Link to a Style Sheet

To break a paragraph’s link to a style sheet without losing the formatting of the paragraph itself, highlight or click the Content tool within the paragraph, and then, on the Style Sheets palette, select the No Style style sheet…

Remove Text Boxes from a Thread

Need to remove a text box here and there without completely breaking the thread? Just delete the unwanted box(es)…

Stop Runaround by Layers

When runaround is set on boxes, it will, by default, push around overlapping text on any layers below the current. Often, that’s the way we want it…

Hanging Punctuation in QuarkXPress

Hanging punctuation–the practice of letting opening punctuation “hang out” beyond the visual edge of a block of text which actually reinforces that edge–is not something that’s automatic in QuarkXPress: it takes a little bit of romancing, but it can be done…

Undo Linking and Unlinking

Between QuarkXPress 6 and 7, numerous improvements were made over previous versions. Some, like the innovation of projects, OpenType support, and, of course, transparency, are huge…

Drop Caps in QuarkXPress

Styling drop caps for your introductory paragraphs using QuarkXPress is straightforward; the trick here is knowing where to find the place where it’s speficied…

Tab Leaders in QuarkXPress

Tab leaders–the lines of filler characters in printed lists and tables of contents that connect the aligned content on one side to the aligned content on the other–are easily obtainable in QuarkXPress…

Phantom Missing Fonts

If you’ve ever been greeted by the Missing Fonts dialog upon opening a QuarkXPress document and been unable to find where the missing fonts are used, this tip is for you…

Embed Fonts in Save Page As EPS

One feature of QuarkXPress around since the early days is Save Page As EPS, located on the File menu. The major drawback to using this feature, though, has always been that fonts aren’t embedded…

Update All Images At Once

Updating linked images can be tedious, especially if the XPress document has traveled across systems and every image must be updated…

Resize Box and Contents Proportionately

You can resize both a box and its content proportionally by holding down CTRL-SHIFT-OPT and either using the greater-than and less-than keys (to size the box down and up)…