QuarkXPress 8 and above has a fairly incredible Scale feature, accessed from the Window menu (Window> Scale). How incredible? Imagine converting an entire print publication to fit an iPad!

That’s what’s amazing: it can scale pages nonproportionally while maintaining the proportions of text and page items. Use it to resize an ad to an entirely new size, or to resize a brochure to another size, with lots of options over which item attributes to maintain or scale.

To open the Scale Settings dialog, just click the square icon at the top right of the Scale palette:

But back to that idea of converting a publication to iPad-size… here’s how I would do it:

1. Click the chain icon in the Scale palette to enable nonproportional scaling.
2. Type in the iPad’s display dimensions (768 pt x 1024 pt)
3. Tick the checkbox labeled “Layout” to scale all the pages in the Layout

I would also experiment with turning on the “Try to Keep Relative Positioning” in the Settings dialog. Sometimes it works like magic.

The conversion happens extremely quickly, and you can even undo the entire scaling process — just choose Edit> Undo!

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.