Text to Box: One Of Quark's Little-Known Gems

Recently this author had to deal with send­ing a file in QuarkXPress 6.5 to a ser­vice provider so that they could cre­ate a sign. 

It was a sim­ple layout–really, just text. But, as it often hap­pens, the ser­vice bureau did­n’t have the fonts and nei­ther did I; the artist pro­vid­ed me with the XPress lay­out file only, uncol­lect­ed. The fel­low at the ser­vice bureau did­n’t real­ly want me to send along the font files either; he sug­gest­ed instead that I send the text as outlines.

And how do you take that on in QuarkXPress?

Text to Box-Our Hero!

The solu­tion is actu­al­ly quite direct, and I find that not a lot of peo­ple talk about it or use it. It’s found on the Style pull­down, and it’s has a sort of awk­ward name: “Text to Box”. 

But it’s well-named. Text to Box is exact­ly that: a func­tion­al­i­ty that takes text you spec­i­fy and con­verts it into a QuarkXPress Beziér pic­ture box, which can then be filled with an appro­pri­ate col­or. The box is no longer editable as text, but it’s not con­nect­ed to any font file, thus break­ing through this designer-service bureau stum­bling block.

It is a Beziér pic­ture box, with all the fea­tures and func­tions of one; it can not only be filled with col­or but also a pic­ture, and, as Pariah Burke showed in this very inspir­ing how-to, fill­ing each sep­a­rate let­ter­form with its own image. Pretty nifty.

Basic Boxing

The basic oper­a­tion of Text to Box is quite straightforward:

1. Using the con­tent tool, high­light the text you’ll want to convert
2. From the Menu Bar, do Style>Text to Box

That’s all there is to it for the basic function. 

You will now, how­ev­er, find that you seem to have two copies of the text you just boxed. The orig­i­nal text is still in place, but a new copy–one which has a big “x” through like tra­di­tion­al pic­ture box­es, and all the Beziér han­dles high­light­ed, will appear, typ­i­cal­ly below the text box in the lay­out. After that, of course, either text or new text-box can be delet­ed, changed, copied, past­ed, filled with col­or or “Get Picture” com­mand, or put on anoth­er lay­er and hid­den. The box can also be stroked for even more design effect, using options in the Frame page of the Modify dia­log box.

Moving the new text-box about is done the same way a reg­u­lar picture-box is, by choos­ing the Item tool, mou­s­ing over the box until you see the cur­sor change into the four-way point­er, then dragging.

Shapes of the let­ter­forms them­selves can be altered with the han­dles along the edges of the let­ters, which is some­thing that would come in handy for logo design­ers, for example.

Advanced Boxing

The basic Text to Box leaves you with an inte­grat­ed pic­ture box with dis­con­ti­nu­ities, not unlike a word-shaped mask. The let­ters can also not be moved about inde­pen­dent­ly; they are all parts of the same box. Also, the word-shaped box can’t be scaled up and down, like text can be.

This can be worked around using a sim­ple keypress:

1. As before, high­light the text you want to convert
2. Do Menu Bar>Style>Text to Box, this time hold­ing down the OPT key on the Mac or the ALT key in Windows

The text will change to a dis­con­tin­u­ous pic­ture box, as before, but some­thing dif­fer­ent has hap­pened: it has not been repli­cat­ed down the lay­out, leav­ing the orig­i­nal text untouched. Also, if you try to move the boxed text, you will find that, first off, you can’t do so.

This is because the text has been con­vert­ed in place in the text box you orig­i­nal­ly gen­er­at­ed, and, more, the object has been anchored inside the text box. This anchored object can now be scaled up and down by the tra­di­tion­al method of hold­ing down CTRL-SHIFT-OPT or > (or live drag­ging with the mouse). It still can’t be edit­ed as text, of course.

Break It Up, You Guys

For those who find the inte­gra­tion of let­ter­forms into a sin­gle yet dis­con­tin­u­ous pic­ture box irri­tat­ing, nev­er fear, you guys, there’s hope! This trick, how­ev­er, only works on type that has not been con­vert­ed to an anchored object (that is to say, the basic method).

Once you’ve select­ed your boxed text, do Menu Bar>Item>Split. The Split menu itself has two items, which work in notably dif­fer­ent ways:

• All Paths: with boxed text, this has the effect of break­ing all let­ter­form box shapes into dis­crete boxes–they are no longer uni­fied. Counters in the let­ter­forms become holes in the boxes.
• Outside Paths: Will break out the let­ter­forms into sep­a­rate box­es as well as cre­at­ing box­es out of the coun­ters. On the minus­cule “e”, for exam­ple, the counter becomes a half-moon shaped object that can be moved off the “e”-shaped pic­ture box, leav­ing no hole behind.

Doubtlessly many design pos­si­bil­i­ties leap to the fore, but the best exam­ple of what this can allow you to do can be seen at the tuto­r­i­al men­tioned ear­li­er in this article.

It's The Paths To...What?

So, it’s been estab­lished: we have this quite nifty lit­tle fea­ture in QuarkXPress called Text to Box which allows us to con­vert our text to, essen­tial­ly, paths, and play cool boxy games with them. But what is all that good for?

As men­tioned before, one of the biggest ben­e­fits of a Text to Box func­tion­al­i­ty is that you can quick­ly solve prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with send­ing fonts to a ser­vice provider. In appli­ca­tions where your pre­cise pos­tion­ing is cru­cial, such as sit­u­a­tions where print lay­outs are designed with strong head­line art, delink­ing the font and its met­rics from the appear­ance of your aligned type can pre­vent unex­pect­ed shifts of type–not every similarly-named font has iden­ti­cal met­rics, and hav­ing metric-independent let­ter­forms can pre­vent unwel­come sur­pris­es down the road.

This font-file inde­pen­dence pays off in very many ways, not just between design­er and ser­vice bureau: export­ing files as PS and EPS files and import­ing them into oth­er appli­ca­tions on oth­er machines becomes much less error prone. 

Just one last word of warn­ing; Beziér text box­es require a great deal more infom­ra­tion than sim­ple pic­ture box­es or text, so the more com­plex the out­line, the more work your plat­form is going to have to do mov­ing them around if you need adjust­ment, so if you do this with heav­i­ly ser­ifed or dec­o­ra­tive fonts like Papyrus, pre­pare to be patient as the appli­ca­tion catch­es up with you.

However, in the main, it’s a clever and pow­er­ful fea­ture in QuarkXPress, and if you like play­ing with type, this will be right up your street.