If you have recently started using QuarkXPress, you may well find yourself making some of the errors outlined in this article. Take a moment to read through our top beginner pitfalls and spare yourself a little frustration in getting to grips with your new software.
Each time you create a new project in QuarkXPress, the New Document window appears. Those new to the program will often create a new project and click OK without taking any notice of the settings in the New Project dialogue. Quark keeps the settings from the last project you created. If these are not suitable for the document you are about to create, alter the page size, orientation, margin and column guides as required.
Having set margins when creating a new project, many new QuarkXPress users will still feel inclined to place their text and picture boxes inside the margin guides, leaving an extra outer space. Remember, the blue outline signify the margin guides not the edges of the page. Normally, the edges of your text boxes will need to be positioned on the margin rather then inside them.
Ruler guides are created by dragging the vertical or horizontal ruler onto the page. As well as providing a visual reference, guides can be used to align elements vertically and horizontally by snapping elements to them like a magnet. For example, if the tops of two text boxes are snapped to the same guide, both boxes will be the same distance from the top of the page. Guides are extremely useful aids but, if over-used (as often happens with new users), you end up with a page covered in confusing green lines. Consider using the measurements palette as well: entering the same x measurement for two boxes will align their left edges and the same y measurement will align their tops.
Incorrect use of guides is another basic error frequently encounter among QuarkXPress users. A typical scenario is where you want to create a new element and align it with something that’s already on the page. So you drag a guide onto the page and align it with the existing element. Then you create your second element and snap it to the guide. This means that only the first element is actually aligned with the guide. Remember, the snap is what makes guides useful. So dragging a guide and aligning it to the edge of a box by eye won’t do. You need to go back to the first element and ensure that it too is snapped onto the guide.
Automatic text boxes is another source of confusion for many QuarkXPress users. This option can be activated when creating a new document and allows you to use Quark in a similar way to a word processing package. Each page in the document automatically has a text box on it and once this box is filled with text, a new page is generated, also containing a text box.
A lot of inexperienced Quark users conclude that this feature just means that you don’t have to create the text box yourself, the program creates it for you. In reality, the automatic text box has a sting in its tail. When it becomes filled with text, it immediately generates a new page, also containing an automatic text box and so on. So, if you use automatic text boxes on single page layouts, you run the risk of having unwanted pages being generated if your text box becomes filled with tex (which can easily happen as you experiment with different typefaces and type sizes.
Another simple error new QuarkXPress users tend to make, is clicking on the text box tool then trying to edit text. This one is not so serious since it’s a non-starter: the only thing you can do with the text box tool is create text boxes. The correct tool for editing text is the Content tool, the second tool on the QuarkXPress toolbar.
Confusion between the item and content tools is another common problem for new users. The item tool is to be used for moving elements on the page and for working with grouped elements. To edit the contents of t text or picture box, use the content tool. This confusion eventually will resolve itself for most users, since each time it arises, they will find the right tool sooner or later even if only through trial and error.
You will often see new QuarkXPress users highlighting the Item tool when resizing text or picture boxes. This is not necessary since resizing a box can be done whether the item or content tool is selected.
Beginners tend to create a lot more text boxes than they actually need. They’ll create a box for a heading, another for the sub heading and so on. Actually, you can change your formatting within the same QuarkXPress text box as many times as you like. There is no need to create a new box each time the format changes. You only really need separate boxes where there are attributes which can’t exist within the same box such as the number of columns.
Focusing on the box rather than the content is another basic error made by inexperienced QuarkXPress users. Unless the user specifies otherwise, QuarkXPress text and picture boxes do not print. Only their contents will actually print. However, many users insist on carefully vertically centring the text within a box forgetting that, to all intents and purposes, there is no box there. The solution to this one is F7 (a shortcut for View – Guides) which hides margin and ruler guides as well as the frame normally shown around text and picture boxes.
The author is a training consultant with OnSiteTrainingCourses.Coms, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Illustrator Classes in London and throughout the UK.