Subtitles of the Movie

Duplicating, Aligning and Distributing. Items in QuarkXPress 8 are defined as boxes, lines, paths and tables. You can approach duplicating in QuarkXPress 8 in a variety of manners and there may not be one right way for you. You may, like I do, mix it up a bit. In this movie I will show you all the different ways there are to duplicate an item. Let's get started by drawing a PictureBox so that we have something to work with. Choose the PictureBox Tool from the Tools Palette and draw a PictureBox. Now select the Item Tool from the Tools Palette or press V, the keyboard shortcut for accessing this tool and click on the PictureBox to select it. Choose copy from the Edit Menu or Contextual Menu or press Command C on a Mac or Control C on Windows. To make the duplicate, choose Paste from the Edit Menu or the Contextual Menu or press Command V on a Mac or Control V on Windows. Once the duplicate is pasted you may press Delete to remove it or click and drag it to another position. Another form of copy paste is to Copy and Paste in place. Since you've already copied this item, choose Paste in Place from the Edit or Contextual Menu. This creates a duplicate directly atop the first one. But if you are on a different page, the item would be pasted on the current page at the same X and Y coordinates of the original. Press Delete to remove the copy. The third option is in the Item Menu. With the PictureBox selected, choose Duplicate from the Item Menu or press Command D on a Mac or Control Do on Windows to duplicate. If you like working from the keyboard, click on the item and hold down the Option Key on a Mac or Alt Key on Windows and drag the item to a new position. Release the mouse and then the modifier key. A duplicate is created in the position where you released the mouse. If you want to constrain this item as you drag it, add the Shift Key. Be sure to release the mouse before you release the keys. Step and Repeat is another form of duplicate. With this form you can make more than one duplicate in one fell swoop. Be sure you still have the Item Tool selected and click on the PictureBox. Choose Step and Repeat from the Item Menu or press the keyboard shortcut of Command Option D on a Mac or Control Alt D on Windows. Type the number of duplicates you wish to make in the Repeat Count Field. In the Horizontal Offset Field, type the value for the offset. Offset is measured from the left edge of the currently-selected item. If you want this duplicate to butt up against the original, check the W Field here in the Measurements Palette and type that value as the offset. Type a value in the Vertical Offset Field. If you want the duplicate to butt up against the original, check the H Field here in the Measurements Palette and type that value in this field. If you use both a horizontal and vertical offset, duplicates will align diagonally. To bump this feature up a notch, let's look at Super Step and Repeat. With the Item Tool still selected, press Command A on a Mac or Control A on Windows and then press Delete to remove all of your items. Now use the PictureBox Tool and draw a small box here in the center of the page. Switch back to the Item Tool by pressing V or selecting it from the Tools Palette. Select the PictureBox and select Super Step and Repeat from the Item Menu. In the resulting Super Step and Repeat Dialog Box, choose a repeat count. For this example I'm going to create eight repeats. This is added to the one I already have for a total of nine. I'll leave my horizontal and vertical offsets at zero. In the Angle Field I type 40. If my PictureBox already had attributes applied to it, I could modify these through the duplicate process. QuarkXPress 8 would automatically calculate the varying percentage for each iteration to achieve the end results that I could define here. From the rotate and scale relative to, I'll choose Top Center and click OK. Of course, this is a complex sample of what you can do but it also illustrates the power of Super Step and Repeat. Now that you have this complex shape, you could turn it into a unique picture or text box by selecting all of the shapes with the Item Tool and then choosing Merge from the Item Menu and Union from the fly-out menu. OK. Let's select the item with the Item Tool and press Delete so that we can take a look at align and distribute. Choose the PictureBox Tool and draw a bunch of random boxes. Don't make any attempt to align them since we'll let QuarkXPress 8 do that for us. Drag one box all the way to the left margin and one box all the way to the right margin. It's OK if the boxes overlap. Click and drag a marquee around the boxes. It's not necessary to fully encompass every box, just that the Marquee Tool touches each one that you wish to include in the alignment process. Using the Measurements Palette, select the Space Align Tab. This small grouping of icons on the left are for space control. This grouping on the right are Alignment Icons. We'll use both. First let's align the top edges of all boxes by clicking the Align Top Edges Icon. If you have trouble finding it, hover over the icons and read the tool tips until you find the right one. Once you have them aligned, click on the Align Bottom Edges Icon. Then try the Align Vertical Centers Icon. Now let's add some spacing. Find and click on the center icon. This is the Space Horizontally Icon. In the Space Field type three P for three picas and click on the Space Left Edges Icon. You get the picture. If you click this Page Relevant Icon, the alignment is distributed over the width of the page. If you align top edges and make it page relative you can also type an offset value into this field. This will place the objects above the page edge by the value you type. The Double Page Icon is for spreads. When you've chosen the Page Relevant Icon, you have the option of switching to Item Relative Mode. Duplicating, aligning and distributing items are easy ways to cut your production time down. If you would like more information on copying and applying box attributes as well, check out the movie on Item Styles in this video tutorial.