Author: Alistair Dabbs

Quark Relaunches Online Support

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Quark’s online support has undergone a major reconstruction, now featuring more powerful help and solutions at the company’s website. In addition to the existing free support pages, Quark has set up a ‘virtual knowledge base’, comprising a public search form for its help database and a self-service portal for registered users. The knowledge base provides answers, tips and technical notes, while the self-service portal lets users track issues, log queries and interact with Quark’s tech support team. Quark also continues to offer free telephone hotline support — something almost unheard of elsewhere in the industry.

Here are some highlights from Quark’s press release:

Two Tools: Quark Knowledge Base and Self-Service Portal
There are two main tools associated with the Virtual Knowledge Base: the Knowledge Base itself and the Self-Service Portal. The Quark Knowledge Base allows customers to access technical articles that offer solutions to commonly encountered problems, explanations for application behaviors, and answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ). More than just a listing of issues often encountered on the web sites of software developers, each Quark solution includes a background section where an in-depth technical analysis is given for specific software behavior.

“The point of including a background section for each solution is to offer customers more than a static and simplistic listing of software issues,” said Craig Lanning, Solutions Manager for the Virtual Knowledge Base Team. “We wanted to create a dynamic tool that contains information that can help customers build their own technical understanding of particular software issues or behaviors. That way, if a similar production issue comes up in the future, they will know right away how to handle it.”

The Self-Service Portal
Users can also access the customer Self-Service Portal from the Knowledge Base. In the Self-Service Portal they can log cases, track the status of cases, and comment on solutions provided through the portal. Customer insights logged in this manner can be added to new or existing Solutions in the Knowledge Base. In order to use the portal customers will need to request log-in information from the Virtual Knowledge Base team. Once logged into the portal, they can also view solutions that relate to their problem.

The following links will take you to the Self Service Portal and Public Knowledge Base for each major product line:

Desktop Customers:
• Self-Service Portal
• Public Knowledge Base

Enterprise Customers:
• Self-Service Portal
• Public Knowledge Base

The Virtual Knowledge Base and Self-Service Portal are available to enterprise customers with maintenance programs and QuarkXPress users with versions 6.5, 7 or 8.

Tip: Select an Object Behind Another Object

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When several items or objects in a page layout overlap, invariably the one that you want to edit is sitting behind another. Luckily, QuarkXPress provides a simple method for selecting objects behind other objects.

In QuarkXPress, just Command-Opt-Shift click on the item that’s in front of the others (Win: Ctrl-Alt-Shift). With each subsequent click, QuarkXPress selects the next item further back in the stack until it reaches the back — the next click selects the front item again. When an obscured item is selected, you can bring it to the front using the F5 key.

Overmatter Checkmate in Seven Moves

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Forgive me, I don’t do design. I’m a sub-editor, which means I work with words. Page layout programs aren’t very good at words: they are graphic design programs that just happen to let you put text into boxes… rather grudgingly, in my opinion.

The fact that QuarkXPress is great for typography is irrelevant. I’m talking about text. You know the sort of thing: sentences, paragraphs, textual communication… basically, the bits on a page that people read rather than look at.

Why, for example, does the program not show overmatter? When there’s too much text to fit inside a box, a little red cross symbol appears, whereupon my designer colleagues nod wisely and say: “Ah, there’s overmatter.” Yes, I know there’s bloody overmatter, thank you very much, but how much is there and what does it say? “Draw another box on the pasteboard and link the text to it,” my designer colleagues advise me.

Oh great. How would you like it if every time a picture was too big to fit inside a picture box, you had to draw another picture box on the pasteboard in order to view the rest of it?

However, until Quark chooses to bundle a Show Overmatter XTension with QuarkXPress, I have little choice but to do as my designer colleagues suggest. But just drawing any old box and linking to it is not what a sub-editor needs. You see, sub-editors don’t cut overmatter: they cut text throughout a story. So my overmatter box must have precisely the same column width as the text on the page. This way, I know how many lines to cut elsewhere in the story.

How’s how I do it in as few steps as possible. Let’s say you have a three-column text box that has run into overmatter.

Overmatter image 1

  1. Press Command+D (Mac) or Ctrl+D (Windows) to duplicate the box.
    Overmatter image 2
  2. Drag the new box onto the pasteboard.
  3. Press Command+A (Mac) or Ctrl+A (Windows) to select all the text, then press Backspace to delete it.
    Overmatter image 3
  4. Click on the original box on the page to select it.
  5. Choose the Linking tool
  6. Click once on the first box, then again on the new box.
    Overmatter image 4
  7. If there’s still overmatter, drag the middle handle of the box on the pasteboard downwards to reveal more of it.
    Overmatter image 5

If you can suggest another way of viewing overmatter for sub-editing while maintaining column widths, but using fewer moves, I’d like to hear from you. Or can you script it?

Refuse To Enter Into Dialog

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I first began using QuarkXPress as a sub-editor in 1989. This is not a badge of honor. It’s an excuse. You see, old habits die hard.

In Terry Gilliam’s 1977 movie Jabberwocky, there’s a scene in which the hero Denis visits a medieval barrel-making factory, a deliberate anachronism intended to satirize the dehumanization of modern-day production lines. When Denis moves a pot of nails a foot nearer one of the workers in the interests of efficiency, the production line immediately loses its rhythm and the factory descends into slapstick chaos.

This scene comes to my mind every time a new version of QuarkXPress appears. The right thing to do is learn all the new features and increase your efficiency by using them. What often happens, though, is that you soon fall back into your old habits because they’re easier to remember and therefore quicker to do.

Wearing my ‘professional trainer’ cap, I see this a lot in experienced students. But when I switch over to my ‘production guru’ cap (actually I prefer the expression ‘page whisperer’), I find I sometimes do the same thing myself.

The most common stuck-in-the-mud habit among QuarkXPress users is their obsession with dialog windows. This is probably because you needed to open dialog windows to do just about anything in the program back in 1989 anyway.

When QuarkXPress 7 came out, we should have been able to reduce our reliance on dialog windows by 90%, thanks to those pop-up tabs in the Measurements palette. But I’m still seeing plenty of dialog abuse. This week I watched in amazement as an apparently responsible adult actually chose to open a dialog window in order to change the font of some selected text. I kid you not.

I suspect that Quark spent so much effort showing you how to use version 7’s clever tabbed Measurements palette for new features such as OpenType, transparency and soft drop shadows that they forgot to mention how it helps you with the old stuff.

So I’m going to retread some new ground for you old-school users out there.

Here’s the Text tab of the Measurements palette. Go on, take a closer look. On the left, I can change the vertical alignment of a text box. On the right, I can define insets for my text box. The Item> Modify>Text dialog window is not needed.

Here’s the Frame tab. Use this to choose a frame width, style and colour. So why are you still pressing Command-B?

Now I’m in the Runaround tab. Here I can choose what kind of runaround I want and define the text outset values. No need to open a dialog to do it.

If you look closely in the Character tab, you may notice that you I can set baseline shift values for selected text without having to go via the Style menu. The Paragraph tab (shown here) lets me set first line indents, left and right indents, and vertical space before and after paragraphs. Forget Style> Formats.

The Align tab contains just about all the Space/Align buttons I could ever need: no dialog, no extra floating palette required.

And finally, the brilliantly named Tabs tab. If you’re fed up with the way QuarkXPress handles tabs through a cumbersome dialog window, you’re obviously using the program incorrectly. Do it in the Measurements palette instead. Simple, really.

Thus ends the lesson for today. Now please excuse me: I have some pages that need whispering to.

Arrange Items Across Layers — And Group Them

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One very useful unique feature of QuarkXPress 7 is the ability to edit text in boxes that are obscured behind other boxes. There are times when it gets fiddly so I use a workaround which I’ll explain below — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

First up, how do you select a text box that’s sitting behind another item? Hold down Command-Opt-Shift (Mac) or Ctrl-Alt-Shift (Windows) and click on the front item: this selects the next item behind it. If you have several items overlapping each other, keep clicking until the item you want is selected.

How do you edit text in that box at the back? Just make sure you have the Content tool active and start typing. As long as the text box is already selected, you can even place the text cursor by clicking it in position, click and drag across characters and so on, just as if the text box was sitting in front of the others.

Take this scenario, for example. Here’s a stylized headline in Lithos Pro, coloured orange.

Arrange Items Across Layers -- And Group Them

And here’s a duplicate I made. I recoloured the text black and applied a 10% slant in the Text tab of the Measurements palette.

Arrange Items Across Layers -- And Group Them

Here I’ve aligned them, one on top of the other, to produce a cute, crisp, tweaked drop-shadow effect.

Arrange Items Across Layers -- And Group Them

The fiddly thing is that every time I change the headline text in the front box, I have to change the shadow text in the other box behind it. I can certainly select the shadow box and edit the text using the technique mentioned earlier, or course, but I’m working on a very busy layout – I keep clicking on the wrong boxes, accidentally moving items, and generally making a mess. And I have up to 20 of these headings in this particular publication over just three spreads.

So what I do is put the two text boxes on different layers.

Arrange Items Across Layers -- And Group Them

Then I group them. Yes, you can group items across more than one layer. When I select the grouped text boxes using the Item tool, this is how they appear in the Layers palette.

Arrange Items Across Layers -- And Group Them

Now when I want to edit the shadow text, I just hide the front layer for a moment. Easy.

Postscript: While this makes a nice exercise in playing with grouped items across layers, there is a much more elegant solution to synchronizing my pairs of headline text boxes and shadow text boxes. Ah, I gave you a clue. Can you guess what it is?