in various palettes.
This menu gives you the power to make changes to an entire page item. (Page items include text boxes, picture boxes, lines, paths, and shared items such as Composition Zones.) You can duplicate the active item, delete it, lock it, group or align it with other items, and change its shape or content type. If you have a path selected, you can edit its segments or anchor points. You can convert editable text to picture boxes. This menu also lets you set up sharing and synchronization of items and their content, create nonprinting notes, and scale one or more items and control how their content and attributes are scaled. If you’re building an e-book from a complex layout, this is where you add text for reflowing.
This one’s simple: Use the Page menu for inserting, deleting, or moving pages, for going directly to a page, or for displaying the Master page assigned to the current page. The Page menu is also where you create or edit a section, which is useful for controlling page numbering in a long document. If you’re working on setting up a Master page, this is where you access its margin guides, column guides, and gridlines.
Commands related to managing an entire, multipage layout are here, such as deleting an entire layout, duplicating it, or adding a new layout to the project. The Layout menu is also where you can change layout properties you set initially when you created the project, such as the layout’s name, page size, orientation, and output intent (print or digital). You can share your layout so that others can work on it, and create a new Layout Specification for Job Jackets. (Job Jackets are a collection of requirements and limitations for specific kinds of projects; they ensure that your layouts will output properly. I tell you more about Job Jackets in Chapter 7.) If you’re making an e-book, you can enter its metadata here and add the entire content of a layout to the reflow in the e-book. And last, in case you’re not fond of clicking the Layout tabs to switch to a different layout, you can choose a layout from a list, or switch to the previous, next, first, or last layout in the project.
When you’re working with a table, you find all the ways to change it on this menu. You can select, insert, or delete rows and columns, select gridlines, combine cells, break the table into pieces, and create headers and footers. This menu is also where you convert tabbed text to a true table, convert a table into text boxes, and link text cells so that text flows from one to the other.
The View menu controls all aspects of what you see on your page and how you see it. Use this menu to control the view percentage, and how you see guides and grids, rulers, invisible characters, and item tags. You can turn on highlighting for content variables (text that is automatically created based on its location in the layout, such as running headers or footers) and cross references (as used in books), and edit text in a special Story Editor that’s like a word processor.
Because QuarkXPress lets you extend items off the edge of the page (also known as a bleed), you can view your page as if the bleed were trimmed off. (A bleed is necessary when a page item extends to the edge of a printed page, because a commercial printer will print your page on larger paper and then trim off the excess – just in case the cutter isn’t accurate.) And because QuarkXPress lets you set any item to be suppressed when printing or exporting, you can hide any suppressed items. (A suppressed item appears in the layout but is not included when exporting or printing. Some items are suppressed automatically, such as nonprinting Notes). In a Print layout, the View menu is also where you go to preview how a layout’s colors will print on various devices (color spaces).
And finally (but very important), you use the View menu to save, manage, and choose among View Sets, which are combinations of View settings. Some examples are Authoring view, which helps when you’re working on page content, and Output Preview, which lets you quickly see how the page will look when printed. You learn all about View Sets later in this chapter.
Longtime QuarkXPress users may forget the first time they discovered the spell-checking tools in the Utilities menu and concluded that this menu holds a hodge-podge of commands and tools that don’t fit under the other menus. New users are about to have that same “a-ha!” experience. If you’re a wordsmith, you’ll want to remember that the spell-checking, word count, and content variable controls are here (not in the Edit menu). The Usage utility is also here, which every user needs to manage fonts and linked pictures.
Following are the tools on the Utilities menu:
❯❯ Insert Character: Lets you insert special characters such as breaking and nonbreaking spaces.
❯❯ Content Variable: A content variable is text that is automatically created based on its location in the layout, such as a running header or footer. This tool lets you create, edit, insert, and remove a content variable or convert one to text.
❯❯ Check Spelling: Check the spelling of a word, a selection of text, a story, a layout, or all Master pages in a layout. On a Mac, Auxiliary Dictionary and Edit Auxiliary are here, too – see explanations in the next two items.
❯❯ Auxiliary Dictionary (Windows only): Lets you specify an auxiliary dictionary for use in spell checking. (You create an auxiliary dictionary and add words to it that you want QuarkXPress to spell check and hyphenate in addition to the words in the built-in dictionary. For example, you might add industry-specific or discipline-specific terms.)
❯❯ Edit Auxiliary (Windows only): Lets you edit the auxiliary dictionary associated with the active layout. This is where you add, edit, and hyphenate words in the auxiliary dictionary.
❯❯ Word and Character Count: Displays the number of words and characters in the active layout or story.
❯❯ Line Check: Finds widows (a lone word on a line at the top of a page), orphans (a lone word at the bottom of a page), loosely justified lines, lines that end with a hyphen, and overflow text.
❯❯ Suggested Hyphenation: Displays the suggested hyphenation for the current word when it breaks at the end of a line.
❯❯ Hyphenation Exceptions: Lets you view and edit the exceptions as well as import and export lists of language-specific hyphenation exceptions.
❯❯ Convert Project Language: Lets you convert all the characters in the active project that use a particular character language to a different character language.
❯❯ Usage: Lets you view and update the status of fonts, pictures, color profiles, tables, Composition Zones, and assets used in layouts.
❯❯ Item Styles Usage: Lets you view and update applied Item Styles.
❯❯ Job Jackets Manager:
