Wed, Feb 27, 2008
Many longtime QuarkXPress users aren’t used to using the handy contextual menus that Quark has built into the product since version 4.
Here’s one that’s particularly handy — and hidden: Control-click or right-click on a blank area of your page to quickly export the layout to PDF.
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Jay Nelson - who has written 864 posts on Planet Quark.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay has a monthly Fonts column in Macworld, writes for several other publications and speaks at industry events.
[...] will post a comment below. (Note: I posted this question on Planet Quark, who provided a helpful reply. Again, it’s something to check with your [...]
4. March 2008 at 3:57 am
A slight tangent, but in the days I was using Quark 6.0, my printer told me not to use Quark’s built-in PDF creator as they had problems with it (it wasn’t an issue as I had Acrobat anyway).
I’ve since heard that this feature has improved a great deal. Can anyone confirm this? And did anyone else have problems with previous versions? I’d be interested to inform the readers of my website.
4. March 2008 at 5:01 pm
While I don’t have a direct answer to your question, I do have a tangent to your tangent. And it may clarify the issue:
Last week I had a conversation with the Recosoft people about their product PDF2ID. It converts PDFs into editable InDesign documents. The problem was that my PDF, which was generated from QuarkXPress 7, was pretty badly mangled when PDF2ID converted it to InDesign.
Their explanation was that there are MANY ways to produce a PDF, including Adobe’s Distiller engine, the Global Graphics engine in QuarkXPress 6 and 7, the Mac OS X print dialog, and others.
In a way, Recosoft is in the position of many RIP developers in that they are attempting to read ANY PDF file and convert it into something else. And just as Recosoft must put their resources into supporting the PDF files that they believe a majority of their customers will be providing, so are the RIP companies. The result is that while most of them have tweaked their systems to accept PDFs created by Adobe products, they may not have correctly implemented the procedures necessary to handle PDFs from the Global Graphics engine.
At least, that’s what I think is happening.
If you add to that the fact that Quark didn’t include any PDF presets for QuarkXPress 6 or 7.0, instead relying on the customers’ knowledge of PDF production (which of course, is widely variable), the resulting PDFs were often huge, bloated, complex beasts. More recently, Quark included presets in QuarkXPress 7.3 that let you choose among the most common standards.
All that said, some folks have no trouble at all outputting PDFs that were created by Quark’s built-in PDF exporter.
I hope this little tour of PDF support/non-support helps illuminate some of the issues involved. It’s not Quark’s fault, any more than it’s the fault of the output providers, Recosoft, or even Adobe.
Someone, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.