Text Boxes with Background of “None”
Some people believe that you shouldn’t set the background of a QuarkXPress text box to None because they’ve heard (incorrectly) that if you do it will take much longer to print. Some people claim that it takes longer because there’s more “hidden data,” and others claim it’s because QuarkXPress has to build a clipping path around each and every character. Both of these are simply and totally wrong.
The ONLY difference between text boxes that have a background of None and those that have an opaque background is that QuarkXPress doesn’t draw a solid box behind the text first.
While seasoned Quark users are accustomed to using Item> Modify to change box attributes, the Measurements palette in recent versions makes it much easier:
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.
Hi – there can be trapping problems when using a fill of none. Place a text box with fill of none and black text partly over the transparent part of a spot-colour Illustrator EPS: the trapping will default to .144pt. Now set the text box background to white: the trapping defaults to knockout. Print-wise, the part of the text that’s over the EPS thickens up in the first scenario but not in the second one. There should be a good reason to leave a text box colour as none, it shouldn’t be the default scenario. And always check the trapping.
Wow, that’s an important exception! I imagine it has to do with how PostScript handles transparency, rather than a glitch in QuarkXPress. Thanks for your thoughtful input.