Subtitles of the Movie

Setting PDF Output Preferences. Most tasks within QuarkXPress 8 have a Company and Preference Settings. This is how you define your preferred method of interaction with the features, tools and application. In most cases preferences are exactly that, the preferred method and you may override the preference with a local setting. In other cases preferences can only be overridden by returning to the Preferences Dialog Box and changing the settings. In this movie I will show you how to set the preferences of PDF output. We'll skip around a bit because the preferences that we need are scattered through out this Dialog Box. The first thing to keep in mind about preferences is that when you set preferences without an open project you are defining the behavior for all new projects that you create, you are not changing the settings for existing projects that you may open after you have changed these settings. To change the preferences of an existing project open the project and then define the settings. Let's get started by launching the Preferences Dialog Box. On a Mac go to the QuarkXPress Menu and choose Preferences. If you are on a Windows PC go to Edit and Preferences. With this project open the Preferences Dialog Box is divided into logical sections, application, project and print layout. In the PDF Preferences Pane you can choose between exporting directly as a PDF or creating a postscript file for distilling at another time. If you choose postscript you may also define a watched folder. Adobe Distiller will watch this folder and when you put a postscript file into it, at specified intervals it will auto generate the PDF. Click the Browse Button to define or locate the folder. Using the virtual memory field you may define how much hard disk space will be dedicated for use as memory for this task. The default name drop-down Menu enables you to set the naming convention for PDF's or postscript files that you generate. If you've chosen the directive PDF Workflow then this drop-down Menu provides options for naming the PDF. If you change this to a postscript workflow the options are for dot PS file format. As discussed in the movie on a subject of creating new projects QuarkXPress 8 Files are called projects. These are containers for layouts. If you look to the top of the Project Window you will see the Project Name here on the left and the layout name on the right. This drop-down Menu is making the same reference. You can choose to auto name PDF and postscript files with the project name followed by the layout name, only the project name, only the layout name or the layout name followed by the project name. Of course you may override this at anytime by simply typing a new name for the exported project but it's much simpler to define a standard here if you will generating a lot of these types of files. In this area you can choose to create a log file which each PDF or postscript file generated. This is great for keeping an eye on for possible problems. If you're going to create log files I recommend that you define a log folder so that you always know where to find the logs. Click the Browse Button to do that and click OK to apply your settings. That one Preference Setting is the most oft asked question I hear. Take a moment to set that up and you can stop worrying about PDF and postscript file names.