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Tip: Drag-and-Drop Color Application
Sometimes I think the folks at Quark like to toss in features just because they’re cool-for example, drag-and-drop color application. Try it: hold your mouse down on one of the tiny color squares on the Colors palette, and drag it over your page. Notice that as you drag, the image of that color square stays attached to your pointer. As you move the pointer over objects, their color changes to the color you’re dragging. Move the pointer past an object, and its color reverts to whatever it was before.
To apply a color to an object, just let go of the mouse button. Note that you can apply a color in this way to backgrounds and borders, but not to text, even if you have the text icon selected on the Color palette. And since the palette is grayed out until you select an object, you can’t drag anything until you’ve selected at least one object.
Tip: Drag-and-Drop Color, Part Two
The engineers at Quark sneaked a feature into XPress and forgot to tell anyone about it. Let’s say you’ve got three boxes on your page. If you drag a color swatch over the first box, it changes color; but as soon as you leave the box, dragging the swatch over to the second box, the first box’s color reverts back to its original state. Now, if you’re holding down the Command key when you drag the swatch out of the box, XPress actually applies the color to the box, so that it doesn’t change after your swatch leaves the box.
If you want all the boxes on your page to be colored yellow, drag the Yellow swatch over each of them with the Command key held down. (If you want all but one to be colored yellow, just don’t hold down the Command key while the swatch leaves that box.)
Read more Real World Tips for QuarkXPress 5 here.
Peachpit Press is offering this book at a discount to creativepro.com readers. Follow this link.
This article was last modified on February 22, 2022
This article was first published on July 31, 2002
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