• Combine Multiple InDesign Documents

    A frequent question is: How do I import or place one InDesign document into another to combine them? Excellent question, but you don’t start from import or place. Open both the source and destination document in InDesign, and tile the two windows. Now, in the Pages palette of the source document, whose pages you want…

  • Layer Blending Mode Shortcut

    Changing layer blending modes is common. So common, in fact, that there’s a shortcut to jump straight to it from your keyboard. SHIFT++ (plus) Where ever you are in your document, just change to the Move tool (V), and hit SHIFT++ to jump immediately to the current layer’s Blend Modes menu. Use the keyboard arrow…

  • Removing Parentheses from the Font Size Field

    Yesterday we learned that, when a text frame is grouped with other objects and scaled, InDesign reflects both the original and scaled size of the type in the Font Size field. It does so by including two values, such as “50 pt(24.85)”. The first is the size originally set, while the parenthetic value is the…

  • Parentheses! In the Font Size Field?

    Have you ever seen two values in the Font Size field–one embraced by parentheses? It could read something like “50 pt(24.85)”. If you haven’t yet noticed such an unexpected thing, you haven’t done much with grouped objects. When you group a text frame or type on a path with other objects, and then resize the…

  • Hanging Punctuation in QuarkXPress

    Hanging punctuation–the practice of letting opening punctuation “hang out” beyond the visual edge of a block of text which actually reinforces that edge–is not something that’s automatic in QuarkXPress: it takes a little bit of romancing, but it can be done. To hang, for instance, an opening quote in a paragraph in QuarkXPress, do the…

  • Undo Linking and Unlinking

    Between QuarkXPress 6 and 7, numerous improvements were made over previous versions. Some, like the innovation of projects, OpenType support, and, of course, transparency, are huge. Others are more subtle, like multiple undo which allows you to back out of some mistakes you may not yet realize–like linking and unlinking text boxes. Accidentally pour the…