QuarkXpress

Quark 4.x (for Macintosh) has a bug where it gets confused about the paths to images used in a document. The symptom: When updating pictures in "picture usage", you will get the message "file not found", even when you tell it exactly where the picture is.

Solutions:

• If you have any servers mounted on your desktop, put them away, and make sure you're not working on a remote document because that has been known to cause file-path problems with Quark as well.
• If you open a document and it immediately pops up a warning about missing/modified images, do not click the default "update" button. Instead, click "cancel" and once the document has opened, go into "picture usage" and then update the images.
• If all else fails, then the sure cure is to quit and relaunch Quark.

Note: It's also a good idea to regularly rebuild your desktop (hold down the Command and Option keys when restarting your Mac).

Common Objects

The most commonly used objects in a Quark XPress document are:

• Text Box
• Graphic Box
• Text Path
• Line / Rule- A rule is a line that is forced to be orthogonal.
• Guides- Guides are your friends

Features

• Style sheets- When working on a newspaper, there are many repetitive tasks such as formatting stories, headlines, jumps, captions, pull quotes, etc. With style sheets, it's a breeze, and there are far fewer errors in formatting.
• Baseline grid- All lines of text on a page should be on the same line vertically. A baseline grid makes this task trivial by insuring that text can only go at specific places. It's hard to explain, except to say that without it, stuff would be a lot more difficult and require more precision.
• Keyboard shortcuts-There are keyboard shortcuts for almost everything. The most useful are the ones for making text bigger and smaller (option-apple-'>','
• Document Masters- Standard layouts can be saved and reused. No more worrying that page numbers and document headers will be incorrect.
• Content libraries- Standard elements (feature boxes, photo boxes, reoccuring advertisements) can saved, and indexed and recalled easily by name.

I use Quark XPress while working on The Triangle, the student newspaper at Drexel University, and I do not know what I would do without it.