Subtitles of the Movie

Setting Tools and Palette Preferences. Most tasks within QuarkXPress 8 have accompanying 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 Tools and Palettes. We'll skip around a bit because the preferences that we need are scattered throughout this dialog box. Later we'll cover other preferences that are relevant to each section of this video tutorial. 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're not changing the settings for existing projects that you may open after you've changed these settings. To change the preferences of an existing project, open the project, then define the settings. Let's get started by launching the Preferences Dialog Box. If you're on a Mac, go to QuarkXPress, Preferences. If you're on Windows, go to Edit Preferences. The Preferences Dialog Box is divided into logical sections; Application, Project, Print Layout, Interactive Layout and Web Layout. We'll focus on Print Layout for the purpose of this video tutorial. We'll start here at the Index Preferences for the Index Palette. If you watched the Index Palette movie, you know that there are markers to indicate words and phrases that have been designated for inclusion within the index. Click this color swatch to change the color of those markers. In the Separation Characters, you can predefine the characters that are automatically entered to separate the entries from each other, in between the consecutive page numbers and to identify page ranges in the generated index, what appears before a cross-reference entry, what style sheet is automatically applied to a cross-reference entry and the characters between the entries. Inside the General Pane of the Print Layout there are preferences for the display color of hyperlink and anchor colors. While it would seem that these would be included in the Web Layout Preferences, hyperlinks may also be used in a PDF workflow. Also in this pane is the check box for Auto Constrain. If you watched the movie on how to use the tools, you know how to draw boxes and lines. This button handles what is called the parent-child relationship. That means that if you were to draw a box and draw another box or a line within the confines of that first box, you would be defining the second item as a child of the first or a parent item. This child can not be dragged outside the parent. This may sound a bit strange but in the early days of QuarkXPress this was the default method. It's still very useful when drawing tables or detailed drawings made up of lots of items that must not be separated. If you're new to QuarkXPress but are new to QuarkXPress 8, the first thing you probably noticed is that the Tools Palette appears light on the toolset. It's not until you see the Tools Preferences that you truly get a feel for the diversity of the new consolidated offerings. Here you may set the default behavior for each tool, for each manner in which it might be used. For instance, while the Text Content Tool does not offer a Pen Tool for putting text on a path, you do have that option when you draw a path. The default for that text on a path is set here. Click the tool, then click the Modify Button or double click on a tool. In the resulting Modify Dialog Box you may define the preferences. I'll click here on my Picture Content Tool. My preference is that my PictureBoxes have a non background color and no runaround. So I'll set that here. Now when I draw a PictureBox it will default to those settings but I can change them locally at any time. In the Layers Pane you set the preference for the default behavior of layers as they are added using the Layers Palette. Choose to make the items assigned to those layers hidden or visible or output suppressed. You may also lock the items by default and keep their runaround attributes. Setting these preferences only takes a minute or two but taking the time to do that will prevent you from having to change the individual attributes manually as you design.