Real World Tips for QuarkXPress 5: Contextual Menus

David Blatner

Context-Sensitive Menus
QuarkXPress 5 introduced context-sensitive menus to QuarkXPress. Context-sensitive menus-menus that appear wherever your cursor is, and which change depending on what you’re clicking on-have been around in other programs for over a decade, but Quark is a little slow to join the party. (Actually, to be fair, the Style Sheets palette did have a context-sensitive menu in version 4.x.) On the Macintosh, you can activate the context-sensitive menu by Control-clicking; in Windows, you simply click with the right mouse button. What you click on determines what kind of menu you get (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

I think context-sensitive menus are one of the best ways to boost your productivity in XPress, right up there with learning the keyboard shortcuts. Just get in the habit of Control-clicking (or right-mouse-button-clicking) on things. I wish there were even more menus, so I could apply text formatting or align objects on the fly. Oh well. There’s always another version in the future.

Zoom Tool
You can also use the Zoom tool on the Tool palette for your quick zooming pleasure. Sorry, did I say “quick?” I hardly find clicking in the Tool palette, then on my document, then back in the Tool palette a “quick” procedure. However, we’re in luck because there’s a keystroke: On the Macintosh, if you hold down the Control and Shift keys, you get a Zoom In tool; add the Option key, and you get a Zoom Out tool. (In earlier versions, it was simply the Control key; in fact, if you like the old way, you can bring it back in the Interactive panel of the Preferences dialog box).

In Windows, you have to press both Control and the spacebar to zoom in; Control-Alt-spacebar provides the Zoom Out tool. (If you have a text box selected, make sure you press the Control key before the spacebar, or else you’ll type a space character.)

Each time you click on your page with the Zoom tool, QuarkXPress zooms in or out by a particular percentage. The increments that it uses can be controlled in the Tool Preferences dialog box.

Control Key Activates
By default, you get a context-sensitive menu when you click with the Control key on the Macintosh and you get the Zoom tool (temporarily) when you Control-Shift-click. You can reverse this behavior in the Interactive panel of the Preferences dialog box by selecting Zoom in the Control Key Activates section. Old fuddy-duddies like me who want XPress to act like it did back in version 3.x and 4.x use this feature.

Read more Real World Tips for QuarkXPress 5 here.