If you’re paranoid, or simply don’t trust yourself to save your projects often enough as you work on them, you can enable QuarkXPress’s Auto Save, or the Auto Backup feature, or both.
When you enable Auto Save, it automatically saves a temporary copy of your project in the background as you work, at whatever time interval you set in Preferences. If your computer crashes, QuarkXPress offers to open the automatically saved version the next time you open your project.
Auto Backup creates a new copy of your project every time you save it and keeps each of the previous copies you’ve saved (up to the number you enter in Preferences). If you decide that your recent changes to a project are awful, you can close it and open one of the previously saved versions, which are stored either in the same folder as your project or in a different folder that you specify in Preferences. To enable these features and adjust their settings, choose QuarkXPress ⇒ Preferences (Mac) or Edit ⇒ Preferences (Windows). In the Application area of the Preferences dialog box, click Open and Save. Choose the Auto Save and Auto Backup settings you prefer and click OK.
In any case, even if you don’t enable Auto Save or Auto Backup, QuarkXPress 2016 silently saves a backup of your last ten opened documents. You find them in the Quark_Backup folder that QuarkXPress creates for you in the Documents folder on your hard drive.
If you find yourself creating a similar document repeatedly, you may be tempted to duplicate it and replace its content. Instead, consider saving it as a template. A template is simply a QuarkXPress document that duplicates itself before opening into QuarkXPress as a new document. To save a document as a template, choose File ⇒ Save As, and in the Save As dialog box, go to the Type drop-down menu and choose Project Template.
To use the template, choose File ⇒ Open and navigate to it on your computer. When you open the template, QuarkXPress 2016 creates a new project from the template file. After making your changes, you can then save it with any name and be confident that you haven’t replaced the original.
Chapter 2
Getting to Know the Interface
IN THIS CHAPTER
❯❯ Using the Application interface versus the Project interface
❯❯ Understanding the purpose of each menu
❯❯ Discovering the value of context menus
❯❯ Working with palettes
❯❯ Using View Sets for different tasks
❯❯ Previewing your work
❯❯ Zooming and panning
❯❯ Moving between layouts
Smart designers and publishers value QuarkXPress for its efficiency. Before each revision of the program, Quark’s design team watches how users perform tasks, and the team comes up with clever ways to reduce the number of mouse clicks required to accomplish those tasks. But still, the first time you launch QuarkXPress, you may think that you’re staring at the cockpit of a commercial jet. Not to worry! The layout is logical, and after you read this chapter, you’ll be pointing and clicking without even thinking about it.
The most important idea to understand is that some interface items relate to only the current layout you’re working on; others relate to QuarkXPress itself; and still others change depending on the active item on your page. For example, if you have multiple layouts open, the layout controls attached to the project window let you view each layout at a different view percentage, with different ruler measurements and (optionally) split windows. In contrast, the free-floating palettes don’t change as you switch among projects and layouts. And amazingly, although the menu bar at the top of your display hosts menu items that can affect anything in QuarkXPress, those menu items change depending on what kind of page item is active.
In this chapter, I take you through an overview of each of the QuarkXPress menus so that you know the purpose of each one. But first I tell you a little about the Application and Project interfaces. Later, you see how to do everything you need to do with palettes, how to navigate your layout by zooming and scrolling, and how to switch around among your various layouts.
Getting a Feel for the Application Interface
The palettes you see at the left, right, and bottom of QuarkXPress (see Figure 2-1) are free floating – you can drag them anywhere that’s convenient for you. In contrast to the palettes, the menus in the menu bar are glued in place: You must always take your mouse up to the menu bar to access them. However, a context-sensitive subset of menu items is also available in the context menu that appears directly under your mouse pointer whenever you Control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) anywhere in QuarkXPress.
You also encounter dialog boxes, which appear whenever you choose a menu item that has an ellipsis (…) after its name. For example, when you choose File ⇒ Open… a dialog box appears that lets you navigate to a file to open, and if you choose File ⇒ Print… a dialog box appears so that you can set your printing options.
FIGURE 2-1: The Application interface controls.
Surveying the Project Interface
Although the vast majority of interface items don’t change when you switch among projects, a few relate only to the currently active project, as follows:
❯❯ Scroll bars: The scroll bars on the right edge and bottom edge of your project window let you see other areas of your current layout.
❯❯ Rulers: The units of measurement for the horizontal and vertical rulers (inches, centimeters, picas) are also specific to your current layout.
❯❯ Layout tabs: Click the tabs between the top ruler and your project’s title bar to move among the layouts in your project.
❯❯
Pasteboard: The rectangle in the center is your active page, and the gray area around it is called the Pasteboard, on which you can store picture boxes, text boxes, or any other page items until you’re ready to position them on that page. If your layout has multiple pages, the Pasteboard around your currently active page appears lighter than the Pasteboard around the other pages.