Tips for QuarkPress 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8

Theresa Stone Jay Nelson

Reproduced with permission of Planet Quark
Snap to Guides
In QuarkXPress 7, a line will snap to a guide at the line’s center, rather than at the edge of its stroke. For thick rules, this can be either Good or Bad. To snap the line using the edge of its stroke, select another object along with it before dragging both items. (Trick: create a temporary item, then delete it after moving the line.)

The opposite behavior occurs when moving a Bézier path to a guide: the edge of its stroke snaps to the guide. To force the center of the path itself to snap, double-click one of its anchor points and then drag that anchor point to the guide. The entire path will move as you drag.
Quickly Isolate a Layer
Here’s a trick for quickly toggling the visibility of just one layer in QuarkXPress 7’s Layers palette:
Control-click the eyeball next to a layer to make it visible and hide all other layers. Control-click a different layer to make that layer visible and hide all the others. To show all layers you must Control-click and choose Show All Layers from the contextual menu that appears.

These same tricks work for Locking layers as well.
Keep Image Attributes when Replacing
QuarkXPress 6, 5 and 4 have a frustrating inability to remember any attributes you’ve applied to a picture box when you replace the picture in the picture box.
For example, when replacing a low-res version of a picture with a high-res version, any offset and scaling values you applied to the original box are lost.

These two free XTensions solve that problem:
1. For QuarkXPress 6, use Badia’s ReplaceInPlace.
2. For QuarkXPress 4 and 5, use Markzware’s PictAttributes XT.
Update Styles from Existing Text
In QuarkXPress 8, if you apply a style sheet and then decide you want to change the formatting of the style sheet, you can simply select some styled text that uses the new formatting and then update the style sheet to match by clicking the Update button in the Style Sheets palette.