*** From the Archives ***

This article is from May 19, 2004, and is no longer current.

QuarkXPress How-To: Experimenting with Initial Caps and Text Runarounds

This story is taken from “QuarkXPress 6 for Print and Web Design.”


Initial caps and text runarounds are the bells and whistles of setting text in a page layout program. But while they seem like pure adornment, drop caps provide important points of entry into text-heavy pages and text that runs around graphics breaks up densely packed columns.
QuarkXPress 6 gives you all the tools you need to create text effects like text runarounds, masked type, and initial caps. But the results can look predictable. You can take these text effects to the next level by learning a few tricks and employing additional techniques such as clipping paths and Restrict to Box options.

In this excerpt from “QuarkXPress 6 for Print and Web Design,” Germany’s top designer Michael Baumgardt shares a few of his favorite tricks for adding punch to ordinary initial caps, type outlines, and text runarounds.
We’ve posted this excerpt as a PDF file. All you do is click this link “Design Techniques: Initial Caps” to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
To open the PDF, you’ll need a full version of Adobe Acrobat (5 or higher) or the Adobe Reader, which you can download here:
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To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.
Excerpted from “QuarkXPress 6 for Print and Web Design” © 2004 Michael Baumgardt. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Peachpit Press. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
 

  • anonymous says:

    While I appreciate the free material and should not be critical… wouldn’t it be useful if this was not a 10MB file for only a dozen pages? Some graphics are 72 dpi and some are full print resolution.

  • anonymous says:

    Hmmm, this is the way they come to me from the publisher. I’ve tried down sampling the images but with little luck. I’ll see what I can do in the future.

    Pamela Pfiffner, editor in chief

  • anonymous says:

    All one has to do is LEARN how to make a PDF for the web. This is crazy.

  • macmama2 says:

    I have tried to download this article several times and after 200 kb it stops….. Using OS X.2, Safari 1.02 and then tried IE 5.2.3, still no success? Any suggestions here?

  • anonymous says:

    The PDF for this tutorial underscores why one should choose Adobe InDesign over Quark. Adobe’s Creative Suite with InDesign is so much better than Quark it makes me laugh. We should be getting more tips for InDesign than Quark from Creativepro.com. Why? Because InDesign and the Adobe Creative Suite are MUCH better professional tools than Quark. Quark is a historical application and no longer is cutting edge in my opinion. Quark is choking on Adobe’s dust.

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