![]() ![]() David Blatner is the author of the books The QuarkXPress 4 Book (Peachpit Press, 1998) and Real World Photoshop 5 (Peachpit Press, 1999) and the video QuarkXPress 4 Tips & Tricks (Learnkey, 1998). But until you find the time to explore, these suggestions will help you speed up your production effortsa d maybe even enjoy your work just a little bit more. The best way to become really efficient in QuarkXPress 4 is to keep your eyes open and spend some time playing around with the program. (This feature is a boon to anyone using run-in heads in their documents, because it’s so much faster than applying the character styles manually.) That means, for example, that you can search for all the 11-point Helvetica text in your document and “replace” the attributes with a character-level style sheet. Similarly, one of the coolest new features in the Find/Change palette is easy to overlook: if you turn on Ignore Attributes, you can search and replace style sheets. Just press command-M, switch to the Text tab of the Modify dialog box, and change the Text Angle setting. For example, the ability to rotate a picture in a picture box is nothing new, but XPress 4 also lets you rotate text in a text box. Sometimes we look at a dialog box and don’t even notice the new features staring back at us. A clunkier but faster option is to use command-option-shift-M (to jump to the Font field of the Measurements palette), press tab (to switch to the Size field), type the size, and press enter.Īnd the infamous Martian still makes an appearance when you delete an object with command-option-shift-K, but in version 4 the same key combination occasionally releases a guy from Neptune, too. Now it opens the Character Attributes dialog box and highlights the Size field, which can be a much slower process when you have more than 20 or 30 fonts loaded. For example, command-shift-backslash () used to open the Font Size dialog box. When you see such artifacts in version 4, you can force XPress to redraw the screen by pressing command-option-period (.).Ĭonfusingly, while version 4 retains all of version 3’s keyboard shortcuts, some of them now work slightly differently. ![]() Changed: Accents can be applied to a selected character or template, which was. XPress has some screen-redraw problems, often leaving pieces of objects on the screen after you’ve deleted or reshaped them. Changed: Default Space width popup menu rearranged in Preferences - Shape pane.command-tab and command-shift-tab select the next and previous tools, respectively, in the tool palette in version 4, the same keystrokes also jump to the next or previous tab in a dialog box.command-F opens the Find/Change palette in version 4, command-option-F closes it.The support community is sparse and their help forum confirmation email didn't send even after requesting new ones, so I wasn't able to join and ask questions. Exporting PDF has no progress bar, the software just goes "not responding" for 10-20 minutes so you have no idea how long you will have to wait. Anytime you click on one of the palettes in the side bar, the whole user interface goes into a mini-seizure and flashes light and dark. Undo operations frequently crash the program. User interface hides itself when window is out of focus for no reason, infuriating when trying to follow a tutorial in a web browser. I call customer support asking for help to get Table styles to work, and they respond that Table styles just don't work on some tables and I have to live with it. Scrolling on a page with 15-20 elements is slow on a modern computer. Table of contents automation lacks customization. Can't open multiple projects at once, makes transferring things to a new project a huge pain. Design flaws in software are a constant obstacle. ![]()
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