QuarkXPress trick: delete pages to reassign masters
Sometimes a well-meaning client wants to tweak a project, but messes up the assignments of master pages. Just yesterday I was working on a book and noticed that the document pages had shifted in an upredictable way.
Rather than manually dragging the pages around in the Page Layout palette, I made use of a little-known feature in QuarkXPress: when you double-click the last page in the Page Layout palette, QuarkXPress will add a new page linked to that page.
Since our chain of text boxes flowed through the entire document, all I had to do was delete the problem pages, then double-click the last page in the Page Layout palette a bunch of times. The result: new pages with fresh master page items, filled with our existing text!
(Note: I’m using QuarkXPress 10—I’m not sure when this feature was added. Also, I tried dragging the Master Page icon onto the document pages in the Page Layout palette, but that didn’t solve the problem.)
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.