Quarkxpress Tips & Tricks: Industrial-Strength Techniques - Softcover

QuarkXPress Tips & Tricks, Second Edition, is clearly for the random-access reader who knows where all of the menu items are and what they do. It's also a bonanza for users who need a push in other areas. The tips in this book are conceptually organized in the same way as they are in its counterpart, The QuarkXPress Book for Macintosh, and a good table of contents makes finding specific tips accessible. The organization inside each chapter tries to keep similar tips, undocumented features, and tasks to be wary of in the same general area. The tips are often brief bits of knowledge rather than instructions that say "use the command-option-shift combination to do such-and-such."

There is one useful item that is not found elsewhere: a low-level trick to fix certain kinds of damaged files. You can find this and other troubleshooting advice in a separate chapter. The book also features appendices that cover AppleScripting and XTensions and a Macintosh-only CD-ROM that is loaded with Macintosh XTensions, a demonstration copy of QuarkXPress, and other tools. Windows users will find a chapter on cross-platform uses as well as some tips scattered throughout the book, but the CD-ROM is just a drink coaster for them.

Like any powerful computer program, QuarkXPress has its quirks. So David Blatner wrote The QuarkXPress Book , the best-selling book of all time on this popular professional desktop publishing program. Many readers demanded more tips like the ones in the book; others sent Blatner their own tips. Several books later, Blatner and two other QuarkXPerts have written QuarkXPress Tips & Tricks, Second Edition . It's a collection of the best tips, tricks, and industrial strength techniques from scores of users all over the world, gathered from online services, meetings and conferences, and letters and interviews. Naturally, the book also includes the authors' own secrets for getting exactly what they want out of the program. The book comes with a CD-ROM with more than 50 megabytes of QuarkXTensions, shareware, clip art, and licensed commercial software.

QuarkXPress Tips & Tricks discusses every aspect of QuarkXPress, including navigating the program's interface, managing long documents, massaging simple text into beautiful type, linking with graphics, and speeding the printing of documents. Other topics include color, style sheets, and XPress Tags. Plus the book includes an extensive chapter to help troubleshoot any problems encountered. The last two chapters cover XPress for Windows and older versions of XPress. Many tips are broken out into instructions; others just give a succinct explanation of some secret, unknown feature. Dozens of black and white and color illustrations complement and clarify the text. This edition is a full rewrite and redesign of the book. It now covers the latest version of QuarkXPress and includes more than one hundred new and undocumented tips, tricks, and techniques for getting the most out of this program.