News Bites

Quick recaps of inter­est­ing news bites you might have missed over the hol­i­day week.

Ugh! I Should Have Done That on a Master Page!

One of the real­ly nice things about InDesign is its lib­er­al pol­i­cy of undo/redo. It invites exper­i­men­ta­tion. Ever exper­i­ment your­self into wish­ing you’d start­ed on a mas­ter page instead of a document …

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 …

Quick Typeface Changes

When you first show the Character palette, the Font Family field is select­ed, with its con­tents high­light­ed. This makes for a light­ning quick way of chang­ing typefaces–press CMD+T/CTRL+T to show the …

Join and Average: What's the Difference?

I’m often asked: What’s the dif­fer­ence between Join and Average? To set the stage, Join and Average com­mands are on the Object > Path menu. Select two anchor points with …

New pdfToolbox2 Plug-Ins for Adobe Acrobat 8

pdfColorConvert, pdfCorrect, and pdfLayerMaker – well-known and estab­lished PDF tools by callas soft­ware for pro­fes­sion­al colour con­ver­sion, the cor­rec­tion of typ­i­cal sources of print­ing errors, the cre­ation of lay­ers, and the opti­miza­tion of PDF files – are now avail­able for Adobe Acrobat Standard and Professional Version 8.

Drop Caps in QuarkXPress

Styling drop caps for your intro­duc­to­ry para­graphs using QuarkXPress is straight­for­ward; the trick here is know­ing where to find the place where it’s spe­fi­cied. As it hap­pens, it’s in the …

Drag Scale Type ala Illustrator

Scaling type hor­i­zon­tal­ly with the appro­pri­ate field on the Character or Control palettes is easy and pre­cise, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly ide­al when try­ing to scale to fit a par­tic­u­lar space or …

Drop Caps in InDesign

Drop caps–those big, attention-getting glyphs that arrest the eye and bring it right into the begin­ning of your story–are a quick and sim­ple thing to achieve in InDesign. The drop caps …