change depending on what kind of page item is active.
In this chapter, I take you through an overview of each of the QuarkXPress menus so that you know the purpose of each one. But first I tell you a little about the Application and Project interfaces. Later, you see how to do everything you need to do with palettes, how to navigate your layout by zooming and scrolling, and how to switch around among your various layouts.
Getting a Feel for the Application Interface
The palettes you see at the left, right, and bottom of QuarkXPress (see Figure 2-1) are free floating – you can drag them anywhere that’s convenient for you. In contrast to the palettes, the menus in the menu bar are glued in place: You must always take your mouse up to the menu bar to access them. However, a context-sensitive subset of menu items is also available in the context menu that appears directly under your mouse pointer whenever you Control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) anywhere in QuarkXPress.
You also encounter dialog boxes, which appear whenever you choose a menu item that has an ellipsis (…) after its name. For example, when you choose File ⇒ Open… a dialog box appears that lets you navigate to a file to open, and if you choose File ⇒ Print… a dialog box appears so that you can set your printing options.
FIGURE 2-1: The Application interface controls.
Surveying the Project Interface
Although the vast majority of interface items don’t change when you switch among projects, a few relate only to the currently active project, as follows:
❯❯ Scroll bars: The scroll bars on the right edge and bottom edge of your project window let you see other areas of your current layout.
❯❯ Rulers: The units of measurement for the horizontal and vertical rulers (inches, centimeters, picas) are also specific to your current layout.
❯❯ Layout tabs: Click the tabs between the top ruler and your project’s title bar to move among the layouts in your project.
❯❯
Pasteboard: The rectangle in the center is your active page, and the gray area around it is called the Pasteboard, on which you can store picture boxes, text boxes, or any other page items until you’re ready to position them on that page. If your layout has multiple pages, the Pasteboard around your currently active page appears lighter than the Pasteboard around the other pages.
❯❯ Layout controls: The Layout controls attached to the bottom left of your project window let you change the view percentage of your project, navigate to other pages within it, and print or export that layout, as shown in Figure 2-2.
FIGURE 2-2: The Project interface controls.
Marching through the Menus
The original Macintosh interface (and later, Windows) was designed to accommodate a very small display. (The original Macs had a 9-inch display, and a 13-inch display was state of the art for years after that.) To get the interface out of the way so that you had space to work in, all the commands were tucked into the menu bar at the top of the display. The menu items that people used most were given a keyboard shortcut, and that tradition continues to this day.
In the sections that follow, I briefly explain the purpose of each menu and highlight a few of the menu items it contains. You can explore the other menu items later in the book as they apply to appropriate topics – otherwise, this section would be completely overwhelming!
Application-level information such as your license code is here, along with application-level controls such as Quark Update settings and hiding or quitting the app. On a Mac, the all-powerful Preferences are here, too. (On Windows, Preferences is in the Edit menu.)
File-level controls such as Open, Print, Save, and Close reside in this menu. The File menu is also where you go to create new projects or libraries, import text or graphics, append colors and style sheets from other projects, export text, layouts or pages to other formats, collect linked files for output, and use Job Jackets. (I explain Job Jackets in Chapter 7.)
This very long menu hosts options to cut, copy and paste items, find and change text or page items, define repeatedly used resources such as colors, style sheets, hyperlinks, lists, color management, output styles (collections of output settings), and play with some wonderfully esoteric font controls. On Windows, the all-powerful Preferences controls are here, too. (On a Mac, Preferences is in the QuarkXPress menu.)
Most of the items in this menu are also available in QuarkXPress palettes. (See the section “Mastering palettes,” later in this chapter, for a detailed explanation of palettes.) The Style menu holds font style controls, picture box formats and controls, item styles, cross references, and hyperlinks.
