Real World Tips for QuarkXPress 5: Starting Up
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What makes David Blatner’s QuarkXPress books so valuable is that they’re full of productivity enhancers that may seem small but which have a big impact on your page-layout workflow.
To kick off our new QuarkXPress 5 series, check out these little helpers. Note that some of these tips may apply to QuarkXPress 4, too, so even if you haven’t upgraded yet, you’ll find this information useful.
Tip: Turnkey QuarkXPress
You can get XPress to start automatically whenever you start up your computer. On the Macintosh, put a blank XPress document or an alias of the XPress program in the Startup Items folder in the System Folder. In Windows, you can put a blank document or a shortcut to QuarkXPress in the Startup folder (it’s inside the Programs folder, in the Start Menu folder, in the Windows folder).
Note that on the Macintosh, you can stop the system from starting XPress by holding down the Shift key as soon as you see your hard disk’s icon appear on-screen (after startup). Keep holding it down until you’re sure XPress isn’t going to start.
Tip: Saving As a 4.0 File
Beware! Saving your file in a 4.0 format can be hazardous to your health (and the health of your document). It’s not that the folks at Quark are trying to make your life miserable, it’s just that you can do things in XPress 5 that XPress 4 just doesn’t understand. The only things you really need to watch out for, however, are layers and tables. Layers aren’t such a big problem unless you want to re-open that file in XPress 5 (in which case, all your layer designations are gone).
Quark is clever enough to recreate the tables using lines and text and picture boxes, which XPress 4 can read just fine. So your table looks exactly the same in version 4, but cannot be edited as a table (each individual box can be edited if need be).
In general, if you’re going to save your document in the 4.0 format, you should always use Save As and then keep the 5.0 version unharmed and unchanged. Also, if you do perform this maneuver, make sure you open the document again and compare the before and after versions carefully. (You have to close the document and reopen it in order to see the changes that were made.)
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.