Because of the difference in the height of uppercase letters in each font (Cap Height), and the difference in the height of the tallest glyph (“Ascent”, which isn’t always an uppercase letter), the position of the first baseline of text in a text frame/box is unpredictable. This can be a problem when you have several text boxes containing differently sized fonts, and want their first baselines to align.
There are several ways to handle this in QuarkXPress. One is to select the text box, choose Item> Modify, then in the Text tab choose First Baseline and enter a value in the Offset field:
To avoid using a dialog box to make this change, you can also use the Text tab in the Measurements palette:
To save yourself time, you can also include this setting in a custom Grid Style (Edit> Grid Styles) or an Item Style (Edit> Item Styles), and then apply it to any text box with one click.
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13. July 2012 at 7:50 am
Hi Jay! Am I right to say the behavior of it has changed with v8 I think (probably along with Unicode support)? I know I wrote an AppleScript to set the First baseline of every text box because of that.
13. July 2012 at 10:22 am
Jean-Marie: I sure don’t know! If you know anything about this, would you please share it here?