Subtitles of the Movie

Merging and appending projects. QuarkXPress has been in use across the globe for decades. That means there are millions, maybe even trillions of documents out there created in everything from QuarkXPress 1 to QuarkXPress 8. Bringing this legacy forward is a topic in and of itself, so in this video I will show you how to merge projects and make them part of the QuarkXPress 8 generation. Often you'll find that you have files that would be better served as a single file. This is especially true if you've upgraded to QuarkXPress 8 from versions that didn't support layout spaced. It's very easy to collect multiple files into a single file using thumbnail drag. This method brings the entire file structure into a QuarkXPress 8 project but you could also drag and drop components between two projects. We'll cover that later in this video tutorial. For now, let's take a look here at thumbnail drag. We'll get started by first merging documents and we'll move on from there. Either create a new project or open an existing project. It's OK if you want to open a document created in an early version of QuarkXPress. Once the project is open, open a second project. The two projects must be of the same size. If they are not, create a new layout in the destination project with the same page dimensions as the project from which you are copying. If you don't do this, then when you drag your project into the destination project, it will change your page sizes. When both documents are open, go to the Window Menu and choose tile. Now you should be able to see both projects, like mine are here, one above the other. From the View Menu, choose Thumbnails. The view of the active project should reduce to thumbnail size. Click in the other project window and make it active and repeat the process, choosing Thumbnails from the View Menu. You may drag just one page, a few pages or all pages. To move one page, click and hold down on the page in the source project and drag to the destination project. Watch for the page icon that will indicate the placement of the page as you drop it and release the mouse. Depending upon the complexity of the page, you may have to wait a moment for the project to update. It's always a good idea to save your project immediately after adding new pages. Now that you know how to drag one page, it's mostly the same steps for multiple pages. Start by clicking on the first page of the series. Then hold down the Shift Key and click on the last page of the series. Release the Shift Key. Now click and hold down on one of the selected pages and drag into position in the new project. Again, it may take a bit for your project to update. Now, what if what you want is page one and page three but not page two? That's easy. Instead of Shift Click, do a Command Click on a Mac or Control Click on Windows. Click on the first page of the series. Then hold down Command on Mac or Control on Windows and click on the next page or pages. Keep going until you've selected all the pages that you want to copy. Then release the key, click and hold down on any of the selected pages, drag to the destination project watching for the placement indicator and release the mouse. If you drag the layout of facing pages into a layout without facing pages, the destination project settings will override the source pages. If you have a project that needs to retain inside and outside margin settings, you could really do some damage. Here again it's easy to just create a new layout in the destination project with matching settings. When you thumbnail drag, all master pages, style sheet and other project resources associated with these pages are copied into the new project as well. You may end up with more than you bargained for so keep an eye on the added resources. A bonus benefit of the thumbnail drag is its ability to fix a corrupt project. If you ever come across a project that's a bit unstable or downright corrupt, try a thumbnail drag and do a new project. Save the new file and see if that doesn't address the issues. Another method for merging projects is to use append. Go to the File Menu and choose Append. Navigate to the project that you want to add and click Open. A list of all the different options that you can append are provided in the left pane of the Append dialog. Click on the layout about half-way down the list. The layouts contained within this project are listed in the available pane. Click the title and the description field provides information about the layout. Double click this title to move it to the including pane and click OK. The alert dialog box provides you with warnings that as you append this layout, you're also appending information that is specific to this project and that may conflict with your current project. Click OK to continue the append process. You can use append and thumbnail drag with previous and current QuarkXPress projects and it provides an easy way to benefit from the multiple layout space feature of QuarkXPress 8.