Are you fairly new to QuarkXPress? If so, you may be guilty of making some of the errors mentioned in this article. Have a quick read and see if there are any pitfalls that you are commonly falling into when you use QuarkXPress.

The New Project dialogue window (which appears automatically whenever a new project is created) is often completely ignored by many QuarkXPress users, even if the settings are not the right ones for the project they are about to create. The settings you see are left over from the last project created: if the new project needs different settings, go ahead and change them.

Having set margins when creating a new project, many new QuarkXPress users will still feel inclined to position their text and picture boxes inside the margin guides, leaving an extra space. Remember, the blue lines represent 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.

Another common error is excessive use of ruler guides. These are created by dragging either the vertical or horizontal ruler onto the page and can be used to align elements using Quark’s handy snap-to-guides features. Snapping two elements to the same guide ensures that their edges are aligned. This is a great feature when used in moderation. However, a lot of users create so many guides that it becomes difficult to see which guide relates to which element on the page. In general, guides are quicker to use but measurements are more accurate.

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.

Automatic text boxes is another source of confusion for many QuarkXPress users. This option can be activated when creating a new document and allows you to use Quark in a similar way to a word processing package. Each page in the document automatically has a text box on it and once this box is filled with text, a new page is generated, also containing a text box.

Many new users assume that all this feature does is to automatically create a text box on the page for you, saving you the trouble of doing so yourself, not realising that the text box created in this way has one other special property. When it becomes filled with text, QuarkXPress automatically creates a new page containing another automatic text box linked to the box on the first page. So if you are creating a single page brochure or advert, an automatic text box is a liability since, if it becomes filled with text for any reason (for example, when you are experimenting with typefaces and font sizes), you end up with an extra page being created.

The text box tool can also be a source of confusion among people who have recently started using QuarkXPress. The text box tool is used to create text boxes. It can’t be used for anything else. However, you will often see new users attempting to use it to edit the text within the box. In fact, the content tool is the only tool which can be used to edit 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.

Many new users also insist on always ensuring that they select the item tool whenever they want to resize a text or picture box. In fact, you can resize a box regardless of whether the item or content tool is selected.

QuarkXPress novices also tend to create far more text boxes than they need to. The worst error people will make is to create a separate box for each different style of text. In actual fact, you can put as many different formats as you like in a single Quark text box. You only need separate text boxes for items which have no direct relation to each other within the layout or which require conflicting text box attributes. So if some of your text is spans two columns and another bit spans one column, you will clearly need to boxes.

In QuarkXPress, unless a text or picture box is given a frame or background fill, it will not print. Yet many Quark users insist on carefully setting attributes like the vertical alignment of the text within the box. Remember, there is no box there: all that matters is the text inside the box. QuarkXPress has a print preview feature which is obtained by pressing F7. This shows the elements that will actually print and hides all guides and design frames. Using this feature can help to remind new users which elements are printable and which are simply visual aids.

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