I work for the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, one of the 50 largest newspapers in the country. We use QuarkXpress to paginate our newspaper every day.

The beauty of Quark is that it can handle a large job like pagination of a major metropolitan newspaper, yet it can also handle small jobs too.

We use the Mac version at work, but I recently bought the Windows version at home. Did you know that I can create a document on my Windows version at home and open it at work in the Mac version on our Power PCs?

Style sheets, templates, libraries and master pages
If you work on projects with a lot of repeating items (icons, headers, column logos) Quark has many ways to make your job easier the second time you put together a project.

Style sheets are great for newspapers or anyone who wants their typography to look consistent. Newspapers use different fonts for body text, headlines, cutlines and other type elements. With Quark, our reporters and copy editors put coding in the documents, so when they are imported into Quark they are already in the correct font.

This is all done with style sheets in Quark. By creating a template with all the style sheets defined, Quark can save you hours of work without having to change the font of everything on your page.

Templates are another way Quark can save you hours of work. We have set up templates for all of our covers. You build a template by building a page. Our templates have the flag (top of the page header) and all the other icons placed on the page. You can build as much of the page as you want before saving it as a template. You can add empty text boxes and picture boxes and have the page nearly totally designed. Just add water-- or in this case your final stories and photos.

Master pages are another type of template you can use. You look at the master pages for your document by selecting VIEW--Document layout.

You can use this function to build four different (or as many as you want) versions of a template and keep them all on one document. Or, as I did in one project, you can keep all templates for one section on one document.

Once you build a section once, there's no reason to keep doing some time-consuming steps over and over. Templates, libraries, style sheets and master pages can cut your workload in half.

A library is where you can put all the little column logos, icons, page toppers and other items that you use on multiple pages. Create a library simply by selecting NEW--Library. This creates a blank library. If you have for instance a column logo that is a picture and type, group the items together then simply drag it into the library. Double click on the item in the library to name it.

When you save your document, any changes you have made to the library (additions or deletions) will also be changed. Now when you need that logo you don't need to build it from scratch. Just drag it from the library onto your page.

In this short review, I've given you four ways QuarkXpress can cut your production time in half. So now can you say it's too expensive?

I think not.



Recommended: No