V and T are Your New Best Friends
The new, streamlined interface in QuarkXPress 8 and 9 makes this already efficient program even more efficient to use. I’ve developed a new habit of pressing V and T to access the Item and Text tool, respectively.
When I’m editing the content of a box (text or picture), and I want to switch to the Item tool — say, to move a bunch of items around — I just click away from any item, and then press V. By clicking away from items, I deselect all items. Then by pressing V, the Item tool is activated.
To edit some text, you can just double-click on the text box. But if the text box is grouped with other items, that doesn’t work — a double-click brings up the Modify Group dialog box. Instead, just press the T key. This switches you to the Text tool, and you can just click on any text box in the group to edit the text in it!
To recap: click-then-V to get the Item tool. Double-click a text box to get the Text tool, or just press T.
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 writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
One of our readers had this request:
“Of course, even better would be if there were a Keyboard command to “click away from any item” or deactivate the box that is currently being typed in. Our fingers are already on the keyboard because we are in a text box and it is a pain to go to the mouse for one click.”
Indeed! I should have mentioned that the Escape key will deselect all selected items. A real timesaver for keyboard jockeys (like me).