XPress XTension Simplifies and Speeds Style Sheets
One of the most powerful aspects of today’s page layout programs is style sheets. Even some word processors have them. A style sheet lets you define a set of characteristics for text: font, size, justification, leading, hyphenation specifications, space before and after paragraphs, and much more. In fact, just about any aspect of text can be specified in a style sheet. After creating several style sheets—body, headlines, subheads, by-lines, etc.—they can be applied to paragraphs of text.
Once you’ve created them, style sheets can really speed up your work. Rather than re-applying all of the individual formatting commands, one merely applies the style sheet; one command takes care of all of the formatting for a given paragraph.
Another benefit of using style sheets is consistency; by applying a style sheet, you’re guaranteed that your body text has the same formatting on page 32 as it has on page one.
Finally, if you later edit a style sheet—change the leading, perhaps, or the typesize—all instances of that style will change throughout your document.
Quarkish Styles
XPress has style sheets. In fact, if you read a review of XPress, you’ll doubtless hear praise for them. But listen up; in reality, Quark’s style sheets are a pain in the rear— better than nothing, but not much. Nothing about XPress is as irksome as its implementation of style sheets.
For starters, applying a style sheet to a range of imported text will strip out any local formatting. For instance, if your article uses bold for emphasis, or italics for the names of books, XPress will convert everything to the basic style. You simply have to go back and manually put the local formatting back in. Aren’t computers great?
The other thing about Quark’s style sheets is the grief you have to go through to create and edit them. To change a font or size, you have to go three dialog boxes deep into the bowels of the program. Want to change the leading? That’s in a different dialog box. If you want to add a rule above or below a paragraph, that’s somewhere else. This is not an efficient system.
Get Em
Help for Quark’s style sheets is on the way, in the form of an XTension from Em Software. It won’t solve all of XPress’ style sheet problems, but it goes far enough that you’ll want a copy.
XStyle adds three (optional) floating palettes to Quark’s already generous selection, making a large monitor—or a two-monitor system—all the more desirable. Two of the palettes are quite small, however, and the third will only be used a small portion of the time. The Paragraph Settings palette and the Character Settings palette are each the same width as Quark’s own Measurements palette, and in practice you might snug them up just underneath it. An option lets you keep the two new palettes together so that they always move as a unit.
The Character Settings palette adds several additional controls to paragraph formatting. You can control the color of the text, its screen value, its horizontal scale, and its baseline shift. It also duplicates the font and size menus from Quark’s Measurement palette, which seems a waste of space.
The Paragraph Settings palette gives a pop-up listing of available style sheets, and also adds boxes for modifying text inset, paragraph indent, and paragraph spacing. This palette provides controls which make fine tuning text much easier.
The Paragraph Settings palette also provides a feature which has always been sorely missing from XPress: character styles. Quark’s style sheets are normally limited to entire paragraphs only; you cannot select a word or phrase and apply a style to it without the entire paragraph changing to match. Let’s say you’d like to have a style sheet to assign a particular format to the names of members as they appear within the paragraphs of a club newsletter. Quark can’t handle this simple request. (PageMaker can’t either. Only DesignStudio/ReadySetGo has this ability.) However, XStyle’s Paragraph Settings palette adds this important feature. Select your text and hold down the Command key while you choose a style from its pop-up style sheet box. Voilá: instant character style sheets. For many, this feature alone would make XStyle desirable.
Editing Styles In Style
The third XStyle palette is the biggest and the most complex. It is the Style Editor. This allows you to skip all of the hierarchical dialog boxes which are usually necessary to edit your style sheets. At the top is a pop-up button listing all of the styles in your document. Choose a style and you can use all of the other buttons and gizmos to edit the style. Make a change and click the “Save” button; your changes will immediately show up in your document. You can also make new style sheets or duplicate and then modify existing style sheets.
The illustration (previous page) shows all of the aspects which can be modified: font, size, style, color, tint, justification, indents, leading, etc. Near the middle of the palette are controls for locking the text to a baseline grid and activating the “Keep with next paragraph” command.
There are some aspects of style sheets which are not available from the XStyle Edit Style box: hyphenation specs, drop caps, rules, and tabs. For these, you’ll have to go back to the original Quark method of dialog boxes within dialog boxes.
Hot Keys
XStyle lets you define hot keys for its three palettes which will bring up the palette (if it is offscreen) and move the cursor to the first field. From there, you can change characteristics in any of its fields without ever leaving the keyboard.
XStyle also has advanced features which allow the user to compare styles in two or more documents, or to copy styles between documents.
All in all, XStyle is a great Xtension for QuarkXPress, one which solves some of the program’s weak points. Once you’ve used it, you won’t want to go back.
Em Software products are distributed exclusively through XChange; (800) 788-7557.
[Note: In this review, I have used the term “style sheet” in the way that Quark uses it; to define a set of paragraph formatting characteristics. More commonly, this is simply referred to as a “style,” and the term “style sheet” refers collectively to all of the styles used in a document.]
Em Software also publishes XData 2.0, a heavy-duty XTension for automatically converting raw data into formatted QuarkXPress documents.
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