Category: Tip

“Save Picture”: a Quick Way to Copy Picture Files

Tip, XTensionsNo Comments

This happens to me all the time: I’m working on a layout and I import a logo or other graphic file. Soon after – I want to grab a copy of that graphic file to store in the same folder as my project — or maybe I want to send it to an associate for them to use. QuarkXPress’s Collect for Output seems like overkill for this, so I turn to an often-overlooked but incredibly handy feature in QuarkXPress: Save Picture.

If you have Quark’s free Vista XTension installed, you can copy the original picture file from wherever it came from to any location you like just by choosing File> Save Picture> Selected Picture…. The dialog box even lets you change the picture’s color mode and/or file format, and relink to the new file. If you’ve used Vista (Picture Effects) to make any changes to the picture, you can optionally choose to permanently apply them to the copy.

The Vista XTension is installed by default, and “Save Picture” is a quick and easy way to grab a picture file.

Tip #2, for Mac users of QuarkXPress 4/5/6/7: the Scripts menu has an item named Images> Copy to Folder… that also lets you copy the original picture files.

Remove Paragraph Formats but Keep Character Formats

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When applying paragraph styles in QuarkXPress, you can remove all local character formatting and Character styles by holding down the Option key when clicking on the paragraph style in the Style Sheets palette.

You can keep the local character formatting but remove local paragraph formatting by holding down Shift-Option instead. This is handy for removing manually applied leading, space before/after, indents, etc., without losing local character formatting.

Master the art of naming masters

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I have just finished working on a little magazine about Shakespearean literature. 48 pages, all in one file.

In the world of magazines, recent years have witnessed an explosion of small-circulation startups. There’s no need for big offices or permanent staff. All that’s required is enough money to cover the three big ‘P’s (print-paper-postage), and then hire a freelance sub-editor to throw the publication together on press day.

Powerful computers are more affordable than ever, so small publishers can happily buy one to sit in a corner, waiting for a freelancer to come in and use it once a week, fortnight or whatever.

This in turn has seen the rise of the single-project publication. Traditionally, magazines are built up from a number of QuarkXPress files, but with just one person dealing with an entire publication, and armed with a powerful computer stuffed with memory, it’s increasingly common to work on a single file that contains all the pages of the entire issue.

An unfortunate side-effect is that instead of working on a range of template documents, I end up working on a single QuarkXPress project into which the original designer has crammed a dozen or more master pages to cover every eventuality. Naturally, these are named ‘A-Master A’, ‘B-Master B’, ‘C-Master C’ and so on. The only way to determine what each master page is for is to open them one by one.

MastersDesigners have forgotten that you can rename master pages to something more helpful.

For example, if ‘D-Master D’ is the template for news pages, why not name it ‘NEW-News spread’? If ‘F-Master F’ is the back page containing sports coverage, why not call it ‘SBP-Sports back page’?

It’s not rocket science, nor is it difficult to do: just click on a master page’s name in the Page Layout palette and type something else in its place. The convention is three characters and a hyphen followed by a descriptive name, like this: ‘ABC-This is my custom master page name’.

A master page by any other name would seem twice as sweet.