One welcome addition to QuarkXPress 8.1 is the display of warning badges when a user had applied a bold or italic style to a font that does not have a bold or italic variant.

In other words, if you apply a Bold or Italic style to a font that doesn’t actually have a Bold or Italic version,  you’ll see a yellow warning triangle next to the style. It doesn’t matter how you applied Bold or Italic: either by clicking the Bold or Italic buttons in the Measurements palette, or by choosing it from the Style menu, or by pressing the keyboard shortcuts (Command/Ctrl-Shift-B or Command/Ctrl-Shift-I).

The warning appears everywhere you can see the style:

• The Style > Type Style submenu
• The Fonts pane of the Usage dialog box (Utilities> Usage)
• The Replace Font dialog box in the Usage dialog box (Utilities> Usage)
• The Measurements palette
• The Glyphs palette
• The Character Attributes dialog box
• The Edit Character Style Sheet dialog box
• The Change To area of the Find/Change palette

This is a welcome change — in my opinion, a change that’s long overdue.

As an aside, there ARE reasons for QuarkXPress to allow users to apply Bold and Italic to fonts without those variants. Non-professional users (organizations with newsletters, educators, etc.) are sometimes required to use a font that doesn’t have a Bold or Italic version. Those users have requested this ability, because in their world, a thickened or slanted version of the font is far better than having no Bold or Italic options at all.

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.