I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I would. To begin with, these guys have a sense of humor. (“While frequenting cocktail parties, we can blithely hint at the magnificent techniques we’ve come upon for using Quark XPress in a networked environment. Our friends and family are amazed as we stand tall, knowing which menu to pull down to create style sheets.”) That alone is a welcome change of pace from the remarkably dreary Mac books that line my shelf (the ones by Tony Bove and Cheryl Rhodes are especially deadly). But don’t let the tongue-in-cheek humor fool you into thinking that this book is a puff job. At work we frequently drag this book out of my backpack before we look for the XPress manual itself—the book is easier to read, it’s better organized, and once in a while it’s a bit more honest.
Quark XPress, for those of you who’ve been living in a cave, has suddenly become the flavor of the month in the page-layout program wars. It’s been known all along for its extremely precise typographic control, which made it popular early on among type-heavy users like book and newspaper publishers (the Denver Post, for one, has used Quark XPress since 1987). For more varied uses, though, earlier versions of XPress were simply a pain in the bleep to use: objects could be grouped only through an unwieldy “parent-child box” arrangement, objects couldn’t be moved from page to page or document to document unless an entire “parent box” with all of its contained “child boxes” was moved; and the program was utterly intolerant of any major design changes once a document was started. I once had to typeset a combination pica ruler and type gauge in XPress for a production shop I used to work for in Boston; halfway through the job, we decided to switch from a vertical to a horizontal orientation. Pretty simple, right? XPress wouldn’t let me do it; it also wouldn’t let me copy the elements I had drawn and paste them into a new document, because either way my “parent box” would fall outside of the page area. I ended up having to reset the whole thing from scratch. I also ended up avoiding XPress altogether for the next three years.
With the release of XPress 3.0, all that has changed. Those nasty parent/child boxes have been relegated to a menu option, and the entire program has a much more friendly and Mac-like interface (not unlike a souped-up DesignStudio, really). XPress now features a Pagemaker-like pasteboard, live scrolling, editable thumbnails, a very handy floating Measurements palette, libraries, object-specific preferences, full object rotation, automatic drop caps, first baseline positioning, anchored graphics, and, well, you’ve seen the ads. There’s plenty more.
Added to XPress’s type-handling and color-separating superiority over its competitors, it comes as no surprise that all these new features have made it such a hot item in the world of electronic publishing these days. On the other hand, it also comes as no surprise that all these features make XPress a fairly complicated thing to learn. The manual isn’t too bad—but this book is better.
The first handy thing about The Quark XPress Book is that it contains over 150 “Tips,” little half-page nuggets of information on subjects ranging from “Adding Your Own Keystrokes” to “Printing for Saddle-stitched Binding.” The second handy thing is that there is a separate Table of Contents for these tips. Instead of searching in vain through the Quark manual’s index for advice on how to overcome XPress’s built-in maximum limit on tracking, one simply looks through the XPress Book’s table of tips and there it is (page 196).
Both tips and text are arranged thematically. After a quick introductory chapter praising version 3.0’s many bells and whistles, Chapter 1 is a basic primer on the Mac interface, file management, and what all those little buttons and commands in Quark do. The authors point out early on that they’re assuming that their readers have just received a Mac and XPress for Christmas and have no idea what to do with either. They note that people who already know their Macs (like nearly everyone reading this newsletter) and those who have used earlier versions of XPress will find most of this chapter redundant; but, since XPress 3.0 does have a lot of new buttons and commands, they recommend skimming through the chapter anyway. So I did. It turns out to be good advice. The chapter reads fast, and it’s packed with 35 of those “tips” I mentioned earlier, several of which were completely new to me.
Chapter 2, “Document Construction,” gets into the specifics of setting up pages in XPress—and since this has changed quite a bit from previous versions of XPress (I’ve already mentioned the parent/child boxes), this chapter calls for a little closer reading. The main focus of the chapter is using and modifying master pages, but some of XPress’s peculiarities are also noted. For one thing, XPress has not one, but two selection tools: an “item tool” that selects and moves text and picture boxes, and a “content tool” that selects and modifies the contents of those boxes. This takes a little getting used to. A few weaknesses in XPress are highlighted here as well. Boxes and objects can only be moved all the way to the back or to the front, not incrementally; and since there’s no way to select a box that’s underneath something else, this can be a real nuisance. I’ve frequently found myself having to shuffle several boxes like a deck of cards in order to get at the one I want to modify—and then I have to do it all over again when I’m through to get them back in the right order. The authors can only say to grin and bear it, but I’ve heard that the upcoming version 3.1 will have a Pagemaker-like modifier key that will allow users to click through overlapping layers of objects.
The next three chapters focus on word processing and typography. This is a pretty dry and dusty subject, but the authors do their best to make it interesting (to give credit where it’s due, two of the chapters were “ghostwritten” by a third writer, Eric Taub). Right off the bat, the authors diverge from the XPress manual by including a section called “When Not to Use Quark XPress”: in short, the message is that if you have to do a lot of word processing, use a word processor. They’re leaner and faster than XPress (or any other page layout program), and Quark has gone to a lot of trouble to include filters, tags, dictionary importers, style sheets, and other goodies (all carefully explained in the book) to ensure that your lovingly crafted text gets imported in at least as good a shape as it was when you typed it.
Speaking of typing, XPress 3.0 includes an incredible array of keyboard equivalents for menu and tool commands, rivaling even Microsoft Word for breadth and complexity. One of the authors is apparently quite fond of these keyboard commands, and several pages are devoted to list after list of them. As for me, I’ve never been allergic to using a mouse—I would rather do a little mousing around than have to memorize a long list of command and option key functions, especially if I’m going to have to memorize one list for XPress, another one for Word, another one for Illustrator, etc., etc. If that’s your cup of tea, however, the keyboard commands are there and the lists are in the book for you to study. Not mentioned in the book, though, is a very handy (and very free) desk accessory called “QuarkXPress Keys” by Bill Steinberg (he’s got another one for DesignStudio). Why memorize all those key combinations? Just stick ’em in your DA menu.
A great deal of time is spent on typographic commands and controls. This may be boring to a lot of folks out there, but hey, I worked as a typesetter for a decade and this is right down my alley. I won’t bore you with the details, but take my word for it: XPress absolutely shuts down the competition in terms of control over type. Period. (Heck, even drop caps have been made effortless.) And the authors of The Quark XPress Book clearly know their type. Anyone who can start off a section by writing
To be honest with you, we use automatic leading when we’re typing up grocery shopping lists. But when we’re working on a project professionally, we define it for ourselves...
is someone who knows what they’re talking about. In fact, that’s a theme that reoccurs throughout the book, and should reoccur throughout every Macintosh software handbook: if it’s automatic, don’t trust it until you’ve tested it. You bought your Mac and your copy of XPress to get control over all this stuff, so for Pete’s sake go ahead and control it.
After a chapter explaining the various Mac graphic formats and how XPress handles each, the XPress Book launches into a chapter titled “Where Text Meets Graphics” (sounds like a pretty good one-line definition of graphic design to me). Not surprisingly, the chapter is primarily devoted to text wraps and runarounds (with a section devoted to anchored graphics, a feature new to both XPress and Pagemaker). XPress has more or less the same text wrap capabilities as its competitors; but there is a major glitch that, in one of the few serious omissions in this book, the authors don’t make note of. Graphic designers and typographers will tell you to avoid, as a general rule, putting a picture or graphic in the middle of a block of text and having the text run on both sides of it, since this tends to break up the readability of the type. But the same people will tell you that rules are made to be broken, and certainly that rule gets broken a lot. Pagemaker and DesignStudio can wrap text around both sides of a graphic; Quark XPress can’t. That’s a problem. I haven’t heard yet whether version 3.1 will fix that or not.
There’s another glitch that the authors fail to address, even though they picture it in one of their illustrations (p. 271). In general, XPress handles drop caps beautifully; no other Macintosh program of any kind does them as quickly or as easily. The problem arises when you place a letter or letters into a picture box, in an effort to make a sort of illustrated or ornate drop cap, and then anchor that to the text. XPress will do that for you—unfortunately, it will ram the runaround type right smack up against the side of the picture box; and I haven’t been able to figure out any way to keep that from happening. It’s a pretty minor problem (how often do you use illustrated drop caps?), but there it is.
And that leads the authors (and us) into the realm of the graphics themselves. Pay careful attention to the tips in these chapters, folks, because they’re a gold mine. There’s all kinds of neat stuff in here that I never knew before. (Did you know that Command-Shift-M centers an image in its picture box? I didn’t.) I should also point out that we’ve been running tests at Savannah Color Separations: starting with a scan of a color slide, we tried outputting it (both to a color printer and as separations to an imagesetter) in every imaginable combination of picture format and output software. We found that the combination that most accurately reproduced the colors of the original was XPress with the image in EPS format. (A word of warning: if you have your monitor set to “millions of colors,” imported Adobe Illustrator files will not appear on screen at all; you’ll have to set it to 8-bit color. This is not XPress’s fault. Adobe has confessed that Illustrator’s screen-preview code needs to be rewritten, but they’ve been putting it off until Freehand 3.0 arrived. It’s arrived, so presumably the next version of Illustrator should work okay.)
Unfortunately, XPress’s fairly considerable image-editing tools don’t work with EPS images, but only with TIFFs and MacPaint images. Which is too bad, because they’re nicer image controls than are offered by the competition. (Did you know that Command-Option-A will make your image enhancements be instantly and continuously applied? There’s another handy tip.) On the other hand, as nice as the controls are, they still don’t hold a candle to a dedicated image-processor like Photoshop or ColorStudio—if it’s an important job you’re working on, you’re a lot better off doing your image manipulation work there and then importing it as an EPS.
The discussion of half-toning techniques in Chapter 8 is particularly useful, since this is a subject of some complexity that, if handled wrong, can cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth. The discussion is also pleasantly frank, as the authors don’t hesitate to point out that half of the pre-set screen options provided in XPress are really pretty worthless. But, as they say, “we guess it’s nice to have the option.”
One problem I’ve experienced a few times isn’t mentioned in this book. I can’t say for a certainty whether this is a problem with XPress in general or with the configuration of the particular Macs I happened to be working with. But on at least two occasions I constructed Quark files containing very large (2–4 meg) color TIFF images, downloaded everything onto floppies, and made my way to my service bureau. When loaded onto the Mac there, however, the Picture Usage command (normally a very handy feature) informed me that my image files had been “modified” and asked me if I wanted to update them. When I said yes, XPress promptly blew the images back up to 100% size (which reminds me of another tip: do your resizing in Photoshop before you import the image into XPress or anything else; the output will look better). But when I called up the Picture Specifications window to put things back in order, it claimed that the images were still 74.5% or 108% or whatever they were originally supposed to be. No matter what I tried, the assigned percentage and the actual percentage remained out of whack. I ended up having to rebuild the file from scratch. That works fine; if you can build your file on the same Mac that it’s going to be output from, you’ll have no trouble. But most of us don’t own imagesetters. I’ve since been told that if the image is only “modified” (as opposed to “missing”) you can just go ahead and print it anyway without updating it. But, like I say, this has happened only with large color TIFF files and nothing else; and it’s only happened those two or three times. I’d be interested to hear if any other Mac Monitor readers have experienced this or not.
The final two chapters deal with color and with printing, and once again the tips fly fast and furious. The chapter on color focuses on the various separation techniques available. Don’t worry about the separations; if you save images in the “5-file desktop publishing” EPS format, Quark will separate them beautifully. Trapping, the other major focus of this chapter, is a little more problematic. (Unlike other programs, which split the weight of a line across its axis, XPress does exactly what you tell it to: if you want a 2-point trap, just type 2 points in the specification box.) XPress has very intricate trapping controls, and it also has a pretty reliable automatic trapping command available as an XTension. Only problem is, XPress can’t seem to discern between objects that completely overlap their background and objects that only partially overlap their background. The latter will get that 2-point stroke all around them whether you want that or not, and the only way around it is to construct your own trap stroke manually. It’s not a fatal flaw, but then again it’s more than just a minor nuisance. The authors point out that the SpectreSeps QX XTension (if you can afford it) will handle that problem for you—but they also have the good sense to point out that desktop color separations are still far from perfect. If you’ve just landed a multi-million dollar contract to do AT&T’s full-color annual report, you’re probably going to want your printer to do your separating and trapping the old-fashioned way: by trained hand and experienced eye.
The chapter on printing contains a lot of material that will be familiar to an experienced Mac nerd (bitmapped vs. outline fonts, how to deal with service bureaus, and so on), but there’s more useful information on halftoning here and a nifty section on how to set up your Quark file to run best on different kinds of printers and binders. There’s also a general troubleshooting section at the end of the chapter that will be useful to one and all. In a tip called “Save the RC Trees” (pretty funny guys, huh?), the authors single out another odd characteristic of XPress. Most programs are written to automatically rotate a page to horizontal format, if possible, in order to conserve the fairly expensive paper and film that imagesetters use. XPress doesn’t. You or your service bureau operator, in order to conserve paper, will have to check the landscape mode in the Page Setup box and rotate the entire page 90° on screen in order to accomplish this. It’s another minor foible; but, heck, if all software was perfect there’d be no need for newsletters like this one, would there?
Toss in an appendix on postscript programming hints and tips, and another one listing hardware, software, and written resources, and what we have here is a very fine software manual. It’s certainly the most entertaining I’ve ever read, and among the most useful. I strongly recommend it.
Editor’s Note: As an excercise, I laid out this article using QuarkXPress, instead of my trusty DesignStudio. A few comments: While Quark’s Master Pages were confusing for a beginner, I can see their benefit. The Picture Preview feature was most welcome, but it did not work on all of my images; TIFF and RIFF are not supported. Although I did not make extensive use of them in this article, Quark’s many image manipulation features were coveted. DesignStudio handles TIFF and RIFF manipulations very well, but it can't screen PICTs or paint files.
I missed DesignStudio’s “Apply” buttons for many dialog boxes. Having to click on “OK” after minor changes just to observe the effect of the change seemed an unnecessary step. Quark has a few Apply buttons, but needs more.
Floating graphics (sometimes known as anchored graphics) was a minor joy, as was the “Rule below” feature. DesignStudio’s “smart paste” and “smart quotes” modes were missed on every page. (I thought all word processing and page layout programs had “smart quotes” by now.) Editors (as well as mortals) need to be able to add text to an almost-finished document once in a while.
Quark’s “show invisibles” command is another feature I wish DesignStudio had.
Quark’s style sheets allow you to control all aspects of formatting: in addition to the expected font/style/size choices, you can choose whether to use all caps, small caps, whether to keep all of the lines of a paragraph together, and whether to have rules above or below paragraphs. All of this is good. However, Quark’s style sheets apply to paragraphs only; you cannot use a style sheet to, for instance, stress names within a paragraph, as you can in DesignStudio. I view this as an extreme limitation, and one that cripples PageMaker, too.
Probably the thing I missed most was the ability to double-click on an object—any object—in order to get at its specification dialog box, where Ican adjust all of its aspects. Despite all of the improvements in this latest version of XPress, there are still too many submenus and dialog boxes for my taste. Quark’s floating format palette goes a long way toward rectifying this.
Nevertheless, I am impressed with XPress 3.0 and the Quark XPress Book. Now if Ican just find time to really read it, instead of just skimming…
Late note: Quark has announced that it will not support TrueType in its next release.
