If you are a veteran QuarkXPress user like myself, you have probably lamented Quark's stubborn refusal to update the QuarkXPress interface over the years.
Hold onto your hats… the new QuarkXPress 8 is here, complete with an interface that has been totally overhauled! Over the next few weeks, I'll be discussing some of my favorite improvements in QuarkXPress 8–the best version of the this top-notch print publishing application in, well, forever!
Let's begin with the most basic of QuarkXPress features… the Tools palette. It won't take you long to notice that the Tools palette has been streamlined from the palette available in QuarkXPress 7 and older.
With the older version of QuarkXPress you had to draw an item (for instance, a text box using the Text Box tool). After drawing the text box, you then had to switch to a different tool, the Content tool, to type or edit text in the text box. While this approach worked, and worked well, for years, the process of switching tools always seems like an extra step to me. In fact, as a long-time QuarkXpress instructor, I found the concept a difficult one to hammer home to my students.
Those problems are distant memories with QuarkXPress 8. Now you draw a text box using the Text Content Tool.
After drawing a text box, you simply double-click inside of the box to begin typing or editing text–even if you've selected the Item tool (the first tool on the Tools palette).
Similarly, you can create boxes for pictures using the Picture Content Tool. Of course, you can, at any time, switch a text content box to a picture box, and vice versa.
If you are a veteran QuarkXPress user, you are probably wondering what happened to the Linking and Unlinking tools, which occupied a prominent place on the old Tools palette. No worries, those tools are still available… they've just been grouped with the Text Content Tool (which is really where they belonged all along).