What is a “Reversed” Path?
When you tell Illustrator or QuarkXPress to “reverse” the direction of an item in a “compound” or “joined” path (hoping to make a see-through “hole” in it), what’s really happening?
One way to think of what’s happening is to imagine cutting an O out of paper. You first use your scissors to cut around the outside of the O in a particular direction. Then, in order to create the inside “hole” of the O, you need to slice through the body of the O and then continue inside the O in a reverse direction. PostScript uses this same logic.
To get to these path options in QuarkXPress, select two items then choose Item> Merge. To get the the donut hole effect, choose Item> Merge> Difference.
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.
In case Quark is following this, I’d like to say (again) that the names of the options for merging paths are completely arbitrary and opaque. There is no relationship between anything in the real world and the names in the list, and no way to tell from the list what any of the options will look like before trying them out. Considering all the emphasis on production-boosting functions with this version, this seems like a huge missed opportunity to me. It should be on the short list for tweaks–maybe a preview window, or at least some sort of accompanying icon for each that would approximate the result?
I agree completely! These are powerful tools/commands, and their names scare off all but the boldest explorers. I’m not sure how they could be renamed to make them more clear, but certainly some kind of icon would be extremely helpful.
I hesitate to suggest that Quark should add another palette, but perhaps a “Merge” palette with preview icons would be welcomed by most users. The same functionality could also be added to the Measurements palette, perhaps in a new tab.
Jonathan, I agree completely. I usually have to try each one to see what I get. For example, I tried the “reverse difference” and “combine” for two circles, as in the above sample and got what appeared to be the same result.
As with much of design software, sometimes the lingo used seems to have underlying background in engineering. ;)
I have found this same problem with trying to learn Quark’s new feature of creating Flash documents. Some of the terminology comes from backend web design, of which I have no experience.