Control Your First Baselines in QuarkXPress
Because of the difference in the height of uppercase letters in each font (Cap Height), and the difference in the height of the tallest glyph (“Ascent”, which isn’t always an uppercase letter), the position of the first baseline of text in a text frame/box is unpredictable. This can be a problem when you have several text boxes containing differently sized fonts, and want their first baselines to align.
There are several ways to handle this in QuarkXPress. One is to select the text box, choose Item> Modify, then in the Text tab choose First Baseline and enter a value in the Offset field:
To avoid using a dialog box to make this change, you can also use the Text tab in the Measurements palette:
To save yourself time, you can also include this setting in a custom Grid Style (Edit> Grid Styles) or an Item Style (Edit> Item Styles), and then apply it to any text box with one click.
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 Jay! Am I right to say the behavior of it has changed with v8 I think (probably along with Unicode support)? I know I wrote an AppleScript to set the First baseline of every text box because of that.
Jean-Marie: I sure don’t know! If you know anything about this, would you please share it here?