Why Use Picas?
Every major graphic design application lets you measure pages and page items in your choice of inches, centimeters, and picas. So why use picas? Believe it or not, if you design a page grid using whole and half picas, it adopts a beauty that’s perfectly suited to columns of text.
For example, try setting your page margins to several picas — try 3p6, which is 3.5 picas (there are 12 points to a pica). Then, set your column margins to 1p6, or one and a half picas. When you need to set a first line indent, try using the point size of the type, which is commonly p10 or p12. The result may surprise you with its intrinsic beauty.
You may notice that a U.S. Letter sized page is exactly 51 picas by 66 picas. This especially lends itself to being divided by picas, which means you can do less thinking about numbers and concentrate more on your designs.
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.
Siempre utilizo picas para mis diseños en quark xpress, no encuentro otra medida más justa que las picas, ya que la tipografías con altura en puntos por defecto, siempre van a dar un resultado mejor que usando otro sistema de medidas.
Aguante el Quark XPress
Ricardo
Ciudad de Buenos Aires
Argentina
I LOVE using picas and points and have done it for the past 28-30 years! I really don’t know why more people don’t use them.
Hi, Diane
I use picas most of the time. Looks as though you and I have been working in Quark for about the same amount of time!
I need a back-up artist for a large project approx Oct. 15 – Nov. 15– ie, if I have to be away for a few days or a week, could you step in and make text changes? I’m working in Quark 8.01 on a PC. virtually all of the work is done via email. Proofs go back and forth as pdfs. for example, there may be a section of 6 pages with edits marked and scanned. You would make those edits in quark and return a pdf as a proof.
Let me know if you’re interested, or if you know someone who could do it. $65/hour.
Susan T.
Are you interested?