Zoom In And Out Quickly

Windows users - use right-click on the mouse to zoom in and out quickly. It toggles the view between Actual Size and Fit in Window. When zooming in, it homes in on the point where the cursor is when you click. If you hold Ctrl down while right-clicking, it toggles between Actual Size and 200% zoom.

As in Photoshop, you can type in an exact zoom percentage in the box at the bottom left of the screen if you want a precise zoom level. This applies for all the things in the Measurements box as well, if you want, say, a precise size for a text or picture box.

If you want to resize a text or a picture box and force the contents to resize accordingly, hold Ctrl (Windows) / Cmd (Macintosh) down while you drag the box's handles.

To center a picture in a box, press Ctrl-Shift-M (Windows) / Cmd-Shift-M (Macintosh). To force the picture to fit the box exactly, press Ctrl-Shift-F (Windows) / Cmd-Shift-F (Macintosh).

If you haven't come across it yet, get friendly with the Group command (under the Item menu). Select a number of items. You can do this by either dragging the Item tool (top of toolbar, looks like a cross) right around the items, or by holding Shift down as you click on each one. Now Item > Group will bind them all together. If you move one, the rest follow. You can still edit the contents of each item individually, but to actually independently move or delete a particular item in a group, you'll have to Ungroup them all first.

Libraries will come in really useful if you use a certain item, or group of items, over and over again. Go to File > New > Library, and choose a name and location for the new library. You'll get a floating window ready to use. What you do is simply drag-and-drop whatever you want from Quark layouts into the window—picture or text boxes with whatever inside them, combinations grouped together, lines, anything. To label an entry in the library, double-click on it. Then you can quickly select something by name from the Labels menu in the Library window. Once something is in there, you can drag-and-drop it into an open document, and a copy will be created there, leaving your library entries intact to be reused over and over.

One of the most annoying things in DTP programs like Quark is when you've got a series of boxes overlaying each other, and one gets 'lost' underneath. You might be able to see it, because the ones in front have transparent backgrounds, but you usually have to move things out the way to actually select it and play around with it—thus messing up your nice layout. Fear no more! Pressing Alt-Ctrl-Shift (Windows) / Alt-Cmd-Shift (Macintosh) all together while clicking on a 'stack' of items will cycle through each one until you've selected the bit you want. And you won't lose the stacking order either. Many thanks to Pete Pavement for showing me this!

Ctrl-D (Windows) / Cmd-D (Macintosh) is a quick way of duplicating an item (i.e. a box or group of boxes) rather than copying & pasting it.

Collect for Output (File menu) is good. It grabs the present document, plus all of the image files you've imported into it, and puts them all together in the same place (folder, disk, whatever). It doesn't collect the fonts used, but creates a report file in ASCII format (with some Xpress tags) listing loads of stuff including fonts used, colors, etc.

Remember you can import various types of text file—rich text, Write & Word documents, a few others. The 'file types' drop-down list in the Get Text dialogue box is deceptive because it only shows ASCII Text to start with, and it doesn't look like you can scroll this list of file types down—but you can. I spent years—literally!—getting everything into ASCII format with asterisks for italics and so on, and then deleting the asterisks and formatting in Quark. You can also export text box contents with Save Text.

You can save a page layout as a graphic file with File > Save Page as EPS. This is useful if, say, you've done an A4 poster and want to shrink it to use it as an A6 flyer. EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript, a graphics format that can contain both bitmap (pixel) and vector (mathematically defined lines) information. They only print correctly on PostScript printers, however. If you don't have one of these, make sure you convert your page EPS file to a TIF file before printing it in any way.

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