QuarkXPress 7: Don’t Let Text Box Overflows Sneak Up on You

When you create new QuarkXPress projects, you can elect to include an Automatic Text Box. You can then type as much text as you want into the text box, or you can import text via File > Import Text.

If there is more text than will fit inside an automatic text box, QuarkXPress will automatically add enough pages to accommodate the text). That’s great. But what happens if you’ve manually drawn a text box using one of the available text box tools and then add more text that will fit? Good question. Unlike automatic text boxes, the overflow text won’t have anywhere to go. When there is overflow text (also known as overset), an overflow marker will appear in the lower right of any text box containing overflow text.

If you ever come across a text box with an overflow alert, you essentially have four choices:

1. You can ignore the overflow and print your project (not a good idea since the overflow text could be a single character or many, many paragraphs)
2. Resize the text box until all of the overflow text appears and the red X disappears
3. Resize the text box until all of the overflow text appears and the red X disappears; then delete the text that was causing the overflow
4. Make the font size used by the story small enough for the overflow text to fit within the text box

Of course, none of the options above matter if you aren’t clued into the fact that one or more text boxes have overflow text. You wouldn’t be the first person to print a project with text boxes containing overflow text (it’s embarrassing but true).

Thankfully there’s a handy utility you can use to ensure that text box overflows don’t sneak up on you.

1. Choose Utilities > Line Check > Search Criteria

2. Remove the check mark from all of the available options except Text Box Overflow

3. Click the Count button

   

   This is one place where a score of 0 is a good thing. If you see anything greater than 0 to the right of Text Box Overflow, click OK and go on a seek and destroy mission. When you find a text box with an overflow alert, take any one of the actions mentioned above (except the first one).

4. Once the overflow marker(s) has been dealt with, run the Count again (Utilities > Line Check > Search Criteria) just to be safe.

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