Sometimes, a well-meaning designer will use one of the process colors (C, M, Y or K) to stand in for a spot color — perhaps because they don’t know what color the spot color will be, or because the spot color changes every month and they don’t want to bother changing the definition of the color in QuarkXPress. 

Regardless of the reason, if you need to globally replace that process color with a spot color, do this:

1. Create the spot color.
2. Since QuarkXPress won’t let you delete or redefine any of the CMYK colors, you need to use Find/Change everywhere that color is used.

First, use Edit> Find/Change to replace the colors in all the text. Then, to change all uses of the color in page items, do this: 

In QuarkXPress 8, choose Edit> Item Find/Change to change all instances of one color to another color. 

In QuarkXPress 7, install Quark’s free XPert Tools set of XTensions and use XPert FindChange. 
(If XPert Tools wasn’t included in the box with your copy of QuarkXPress 7, you can download it from Quark’s website.)

To do this in earlier versions of QuarkXPress, you’ll need to acquire an older version of alap’s XPert Tools, which was a commercial product before Quark acquired alap.

Jay Nelson

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.