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If you have recently started using QuarkXPress, you may well find yourself making some of the errors outlined in this article. Take a moment to read through our top beginner pitfalls and spare yourself a little frustration in getting to grips with your new software.

When you create a new project in QuarkXPress, the New Document window appears. Users new to QuarkXPress will often create a new project and click OK without taking the slightest notice of the settings in the New Project dialogue. Quark keeps the settings from the last project you created. If these are unsuitable for the document you are about to create, adjust the page size, orientation, margin and column guides as needed.

Having set margins when creating a new project, many new QuarkXPress users will still feel inclined to set their text and picture boxes inside the margin guides, leaving an extra gap. Remember, the blue outline denote the margin guides not the edges of the page. Normally, the edges of your text boxes will need to be positioned on the margin rather then inside them.

Ruler guides are created by dragging the vertical or horizontal ruler onto the page. As well as providing a visual reference, guides can be used to align elements vertically and horizontally by snapping elements to them like a magnet. For example, if the tops of two text boxes are snapped to the same guide, both boxes will be the same distance from the top of the page. Guides are extremely useful aids but, if over-used (as often happens with new users), you end up with a page covered in confusing green lines. Consider using the measurements palette as well: entering the same x measurement for two boxes will align their left edges and the same y measurement will align their tops.

When using QuarkXPress, it’s often the case that you want to align a new element with something that’s already on the page and, if you are fond of using guides for alignment, you will probably drag a guide onto one of the edges of the existing element and then snap the new element to the guide. Bear in mind when you do this, however, that only the second element is actually properly aligned with the guide, since dragging a guide close to an object doesn’t snap the object to the guide; only the reverse is true. To have both elements correctly aligned, you will need to also snap the first element to the guide.

The automatic text box feature in QuarkXPress can be activated when creating a new project: you just click on the check-box marked “Automatic Text Box”. It allows us to go into something approaching word processing mode. It should be used when creating multi-page documents consisting mainly of text such as a report or book.

The automatic text box feature is great for long documents. However, you will often see QuarkXPress users activating this option when creating short documents or even documents consisting of a single page. They make the assumption that all the feature does is to save them the trouble of creating a text box. In fact, if the text box ever becomes filled with text (which can easily happen as you experiment with different text formats), a new page is immediately generated and your single page document becomes a two page document.

Users new to QuarkXPress will often develop a strange fascination with the text box tool and try to assign it powers that it doesn’t in fact possess! For example, they will attempt to edit text by selecting the text box tool and clicking on the text. In fact, the only thing the text box tool can do is to actually create the text box in the first place. Thereafter, the content tool should be used for entering and editing the text.

You will also often see new users attempting to edit text or move a picture inside a picture box when the Item tool is highlighted. This is a non-starter since the contents of a box can only be edited with the content tool. Admittedly, most users will eventually realise this if only through trial and error.

Another common Item/Content tool error is that new users will often insist on selecting the Item tool when resizing a box: in fact, resizing works fine regardless of whether the Content or Item tool is selected.

QuarkXPress newbies will often create more text boxes than they need to (This box is for my heading, this one is for my subheading, and so on…), forgetting that the format of text can be changed as many times as necessary within the same box. Separate text boxes need to be created only where the attributes of different blocks of text cannot be accommodated within the same box: for example, a heading spanning two columns above a two column story.

Beginners in QuarkXPress will often spend a lot of time aligning headings within a text box, for example vertically centring, forgetting that, since the box will not print, all that matters is the position of the text itself on the page. A good way of curing this one is to get into the habit of pressing F7 (a shortcut for View – Guides). This keystroke toggles the visibility of the QuarkXPress margin and ruler guides as well as the edges of boxes that have no frames. This means that you are always reminded of which elements will actually be visible when the document prints.

The The writer of this article is a training consultant with OnSiteTrainingCourses.Coms, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Illustrator Classes in London and throughout the UK.

categories: QuarkXPress,beginners in QuarkXPress,Quark Express,computing,computer software,information technology