Help! QuarkXpress...

Thanks in advance!

it's a page layout application. I spend a lot of my job dealing with people who are self taught and have never really got to grips with how to use it properly. There is a lot to it, there are lots of hidden gotchas, there are lots of wrong ways to do things.

If this is for professional publishing then you'll really need to know it. Fortunately a lot of businesses that use Quark Xpress do so because they don't know any better and you could probably wing it (put box here, type text, change colour, blah, simple).

That way the people who have to repro your pages end up miserable :-) as they have to redo it for you correctly. At least that's my experience.

HTH

Thanks! The job is not in pro-publishing...it is for "a student activities co-ordinator (Media)"

Quark is lovely: you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly - I was never formally trained to use it, went over four years without using and started off again just fine. With Quark - as with a lot of software I guess - there is a slow, medium and quick way to everything, and the slow ways are usually really straightforwards. Also, it's infantile, but I've always enjoyed getting the spaceman thing to zap deleted pages...

there is a very good quarkxpress FAQ floating around on the interweb somewhere. it covers a lot of the gotchas i was moaning about.

Its a page layout programme, and you can import pictures and text and put them together on a page. I'd imagine you'd be using either QX 4.1 or 4.04 (industry standard - useful blag tool in interviews!) It is pretty easy to understand - 1) you make text boxes to put text in. Within those text boxes, you have a more powerful version of Word, essentially, to typeset the text into whatever shape you like. 2) You have different boxes for pictures, and you 'import' the pictures (EPS, JPEG, TIF files) into those boxes. You can use QX to change their size, shape and rotation. 3) Then there's a tool to move the text boxes and picture boxes around on the page. That, basically, is it. Although there are a lot of interesting variations on the main theme...!

find someone to teach you the key commands ASAP. Great ones are
COM + SHIFT + N = tab adjust
COM + , = align
COM + T = type/picture box controls
F5 = bring to front
SHIFT + F5 = back
F7 = hide/show guides
And line everything up using the x and y coordinates in the bottom toolbox to save enormous time.
I'm letting you know this because a lot of jobs give QUARK TESTS where key commands are necessary, otherwise, you don't really "know" quark. In other words, you need to blaze through the annoying little facets of the program in order to be productive.

woops. COM + SHIFT + N = rules and stuff
COM + SHIFT + T = tab adjust

spock is correct: quark's keyboard shortcuts rool

I'm a graphic designer and use Quark every day... but everyone's answered the question already.