A Planet Quark reader recently bemoaned the retiring of ALAP’s ShadowCaster XTension for QuarkXPress, and wanted to know how to create an outer glow using the Drop Shadow features built into QuarkXPress 7 and above.

Well, here’s one way:

Type “0” in the first field (Distance — or offset)
Type 100% in the second field (Scale — or size)
Then play with the third field (Blur) to get what you want.
The value in the “Angle” field can be anything — it doesn’t matter.

Here’s an example of how it could look on text:

And on a star:

By the way, I used the Starburst tool to create the star, with these settings:

To access the Starburst settings, you can either double-click the Starburst tool in the toolbox, or select the Starburst tool and then single-click on your page. If you use the first (double-click) technique, the next star you draw will have those settings; if you use the second technique, then when you close the settings dialog box a star will appear on your page where you clicked.

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.