Icons Used in This Book
As you read this book, you encounter icons in the margins that indicate material of special interest. Here’s what the icons mean:
Beyond the Book
The great Internet contains a couple of additional resources for readers of this book:
❯❯ Cheat Sheet: QuarkXPress is all about efficiency, and nothing is more efficient than using your keyboard to accomplish tasks. That’s why there’s a keyboard shortcut for just about every important operation in the program. The ones that power users find most useful are collected in the Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com (search for QuarkXPress For Dummies Cheat Sheet).
❯❯ Updates: If Quark changes something important about QuarkXPress between the time this book is published and the next major revision of QuarkXPress, look for updates at www.dummies.com.
Where to Go from Here
This book isn’t linear – you can start almost anywhere if you already understand the basics of how QuarkXPress works. However, if you’re new to QuarkXPress, Chapters 1 and 2 familiarize you with its overall purpose and interface. Chapters 3 and 4 explain how to create Items and work with them. Chapter 5 explains how to use master pages to ensure uniformity across multiple pages. QuarkXPress has a unique approach to sharing content across pages, layouts, and even multiple users, and Chapter 7 explains that. Most users spend 80 percent of their time in QuarkXPress working with text, so Chapters 8 through 11 dive deeply into the realm of text. Tables, pictures, and colors are explained in Chapters 12 through 15. Printing gets its own chapter (16), followed by a deep immersion into all the ways you can enhance and export your projects for digital media such as PDF and e-books. As you complete different kinds of projects in QuarkXPress, you may think: “There has to be an easier/better way!” so Chapter 18 points you to additional resources for help with specific topics. And finally, Chapter 19 attempts to smooth your QuarkXPress path with ten do’s and don’ts that are easy to forget but powerful if you remember them.
Part 1
Getting Started with QuarkXPress
IN THIS PART …
Understanding QuarkXPress
What’s new in QuarkXPress 2016
Getting to know the interface
Creating and working with boxes, lines and text paths
Converting InDesign, Illustrator, PDF, and Microsoft Office files to native QuarkXPress items
Building a layout, a project, and a book
Syncing and collaborating with the sharing features
Chapter 1
Meeting QuarkXPress 2016
IN THIS CHAPTER
❯❯ Getting acquainted with QuarkXPress
❯❯ Finding out what’s new in QuarkXPress 2016
❯❯ Catching up with recent versions’ enhancements
❯❯ Knowing how to manage your files from the get-go
❯❯ Opening, creating, and saving files
QuarkXPress 2016 is not your daddy’s QuarkXPress. It may not even be your QuarkXPress if you haven’t used it since version 7. QuarkXPress has evolved far past its spectacular first incarnation as the world’s greatest tool for laying out pages for print. Adobe may have infiltrated the desktops of graphic designers by giving away InDesign, but QuarkXPress is still the industry’s most efficient engine for producing documents for multiple media. It’s currently in use by more than a million customers worldwide, especially in markets that value efficiency, such as manufacturing, financial, real estate, and pharmaceuticals, as well as book publishers, magazines, newspapers, and a wide variety of retailers and smart graphic designers.
In this chapter, I give you a brief overview of some QuarkXPress fundamentals and bring you up to speed on the new features in QuarkXPress 2016 as well as the major enhancements added to recent versions. Also, I provide some real-world advice for creating, naming, and organizing your files, opening older QuarkXPress documents, and saving your QuarkXPress 2016 document so that it can be read by QuarkXPress 2015. And finally, I point you to a hidden feature that saves backup copies of your files.
Understanding What QuarkXPress Does
QuarkXPress is a page layout program. To build a page, you draw a few boxes (containers) and fill them with content (text, pictures, and other stuff). Add a few rules (lines) and frames (picture edges) and you have a layout. If you’re clever, you link your page to a master page (which holds items such as page numbers and headers that repeat on multiple pages) and organize your page items on layers (to cluster related items together for viewing or printing).
Over the years, QuarkXPress has evolved to support the needs of publishers and designers with major new capabilities such as interactive and animated items, Bézier (pen) tools that rival Adobe Illustrator, real-time collaboration with others working on the same document, creating e-books and even mobile apps, supplying powerful table-creation tools, converting content from other programs into native QuarkXPress items, creating anchored callouts, and providing support for dozens of languages in the same document.
In case the built-in features aren’t enough for you, you can buy and add third-party XTensions to QuarkXPress, which are plug-ins that add new capabilities ranging from one feature to an entire automated database publishing system.