Subtitles of the Movie

Setting Text Preferences. Most tasks within QuarkXPress 8 has 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 text. We'll skip around a bit because preferences that we need are scattered throughout this dialog box. Later we will 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 the preferences without an open project, you are defining the behavior for all new projects that you create. You are not changing the settings for current projects that you may open after you have changed these settings. To change the preferences of an existing project, open the project and define the settings. Let's get started by launching the Preferences Dialog Box. On a Mac go the QuarkXPress Menu and choose Preferences. If you're on a Windows PC, go to the Edit Menu and choose Preferences. The Preferences Dialog Box is divided into logical sections; application, project, print layout, interactive layout and web layout. We'll focus on the print layout for the purpose of this video tutorial. We'll start here at Font Fallback, which is the ability of an application to automatically and intelligently select an alternate font for a specific character when the current font can't display or print that character. By setting the preferences, you can have QuarkXPress 8 automatically search your system for a font that is able to display a character that's not available in the current font. Font Fallback is on by default. The default for font preferences is called WYSIWYG. This means that font menus display in the fonts' typeface, not just as a title. Also here is the ability to disable the Missing Fonts Dialog Box and to automatically replace missing fonts with the font that you define here. This is an example of the particular edition of QuarkXPress that I am using; the Plus edition. And unless you're using the same edition, you may not have the same options. In the Spell Check Pane, you can enable this feature to skip words that have numerals in them and here to obvious email addresses and URLs. If you're using German text, with this enabled you will be using the reformed German dictionary. QuarkXPress 8 has full support for Unicode and with that the ability to use open-type fonts and all of the glyphs available in those fonts. Many fonts include glyphs specifically for fractions, but in those cases where you're using a font that does not, you might choose to use QuarkXPress 8's internal functions for creating fractions and prices. If you do, you may want to adjust these preferences. Here you can set the offset of the numerator and denominator, the vertical and horizontal scaling and the kern value. You may also affect the /in between the numerals and use a more upright /that is specific to fractions. When using the Price Feature, you might choose to underline the cents portion of the price and delete the radix, which in the US is the decimal before the cents. In the Paragraph Pane of the Default Print Layout Section, you set the default for the letting amount that you use when it's auto value. This value is very typically two points but you may set it as you choose. The Maintain Letting Check Box manages what happens to your next line of text when an obstruction is in the path. With this checked, the letting would be measured from the bottom of the obstruction. With this unchecked, the text would abut the obstruction. In this area you can choose whether text locked to the grid is locked based on the ascent and descent of characters or based on the M box size of the font size. In the Hyphenation Pane you can language by language choose the method of hyphenation applied when that language is used. In the Character Pane you set the preferences for the offset from the baselines of superscript and Subscript characters. You can also set the scale both vertically and horizontally as well as for small caps such as acronyms used in body copy and superior characters such as registered and trademark. Ligatures are multiple characters represented by a single glyph such as FFI, FFL and in some fonts TH, CT and others. If you use ligatures, this field enables you to break them apart when you have applied tracking or kerning above whatever number you type here as the threshold. Check this box if you do not want to use ligatures for FFI or FFL. QuarkXPress 8 can automatically apply kerning. When it does you can set a threshold here to decide at what point size text should not automatically be kerned. In addition to a standard space, QuarkXPress 8 also provides you an N space, an M space and a flex space. An M space when this box is checked is the same width as the point size in which you are using it. If you do not check this box, QuarkXPress 8 creates an M space equal to two zeros in that font. A flex space is created when you press Option Shift Space on a Mac or Control Shift 5 on Windows. You can make it non-breaking by adding Command to that keyboard shortcut. A flex space is a percentage of the normal N space for a given font and font size. Finally, with this box checked you can enable the option of adding accent marks to any capitalized letter when using the All Caps Type Style. If you first watch the text formatting movies before this preferences movie, most of these settings will make sense to you. If they do not, you may choose to turn to the user's guide for additional explanations.