At the height of its worldwide popularity, QuarkXPress had almost 4 million users. That proved too tempting a plum for the competing Adobe juggernaut not to pluck from the desktop publishing pie, so over the course of 10 years, Adobe was able to draw many graphic designers to InDesign by providing it for free in bundles with Photoshop and Illustrator. Meanwhile, Quark underwent a complete metamorphosis, changing ownership and management to become the company that created this jewel of digital publishing: QuarkXPress 2016.
Meanwhile, the publishing industry itself experienced major changes, embracing multiple ever-changing digital formats — and QuarkXPress evolved along with these changes. QuarkXPress 2016 is not your father’s, mother’s, or grandparents’ QuarkXPress: Although the program has maintained its trademark efficiency and focus on the day-to-day needs of real-world publishers, it has also become a multifunction, platform-agnostic publishing engine capable of efficiently producing documents for any medium today — or that may present itself in the future.
Many graphic designers lost track of QuarkXPress, and they wonder what kind of organizations have continued to use it year after year. The simple answer is this: companies that value time and efficiency over bells and whistles. Financial organizations, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing industries, newspapers and magazines, book publishers, multilingual publishers, and especially East Asian publishers all rely on QuarkXPress because it saves them time.
QuarkXPress is happily experiencing a resurgence of interest from publishers and graphic designers, partly because it remains efficient, practical, and elegant, but also because it combines the features of several competing programs. You can use it for most tasks that publishers habitually use Adobe Illustrator for — but with a more efficient interface. (In fact, if you preferred Aldus FreeHand’s efficient, task-based interface over Illustrator’s byzantine tool-based interface, you might find yourself using QuarkXPress as if it were FreeHand!)
Another reason is cost: QuarkXPress is still sold with a perpetual license — there are no monthly fees to use it, and its year-over-year cost is significantly lower than Adobe’s InDesign or Creative Cloud suite. And now it can convert PDF, Illustrator, EPS, InDesign, and Microsoft Office content into native QuarkXPress items — a first in the industry.
I’m proud to have been asked to contribute a book to this successful book series. But, don’t be fooled by the series title. If you are using or considering using QuarkXPress, you are far from being a dummy. This is world-class software that will efficiently and effectively support your creative work for years to come.
The purpose of QuarkXPress For Dummies is to clearly explain the fundamentals of how to use all the tools in QuarkXPress. Whether you’re new to QuarkXPress or upgrading to the latest version, you get answers to your real-world questions about how stuff works. If you’re looking for a comprehensive book on how to do absolutely everything in QuarkXPress inside out, backward and wearing heels, this is not it. That book doesn’t exist — and if it did, it would be three times the size of this one. This book was written to QuarkXPress 2016 and should be useful to anyone using QuarkXPress versions back to 8.
To help you absorb the concepts, this book uses the following conventions:
http://www.dummies.com
.The first assumption is that you’re familiar with Mac OS or Windows, because the book doesn’t provide any guidance in this regard. This book doesn’t discuss any platform-specific issues. You need to know how to work with your chosen platform before you begin working with this book.
As you read this book, you encounter icons in the margins that indicate material of special interest. Here’s what the icons mean:
The great Internet contains a couple of additional resources for readers of this book:
www.dummies.com
(search for QuarkXPress For Dummies Cheat Sheet).www.dummies.com
.This book isn’t linear — you can start almost anywhere if you already understand the basics of how QuarkXPress works. However, if you’re new to QuarkXPress, Chapters 1 and 2 familiarize you with its overall purpose and interface. Chapters 3 and 4 explain how to create Items and work with them. Chapter 5 explains how to use master pages to ensure uniformity across multiple pages. QuarkXPress has a unique approach to sharing content across pages, layouts, and even multiple users, and Chapter 7 explains that. Most users spend 80 percent of their time in QuarkXPress working with text, so Chapters 8 through 11 dive deeply into the realm of text. Tables, pictures, and colors are explained in Chapters 12 through 15. Printing gets its own chapter (16), followed by a deep immersion into all the ways you can enhance and export your projects for digital media such as PDF and e-books. As you complete different kinds of projects in QuarkXPress, you may think: “There has to be an easier/better way!” so Chapter 18 points you to additional resources for help with specific topics. And finally, Chapter 19 attempts to smooth your QuarkXPress path with ten do’s and don’ts that are easy to forget but powerful if you remember them.