More Quark Lessons Learned

Quark and The Reluctant Typographer Page

Preparing the Manuscript for Import to Quark

Importing to Quark

Linking Pages

Adding Pages and Master Pages

Adding Pages with Lots of Text Boxes

Quark's Collect for Output

Dealing with Fonts

What to Send to the Printer

Creating Individual PDF Pages From an Entire Book

Drop Caps

Quark has a drop cap application. Initially, I tried to use it at the beginning of my chapters. Many of my chapters start with a line or two of dialogue. With a three-line drop cap, my basic text skipped a line when I tried to indent. I tried a smaller drop cap, but the effect wasn’t striking. I’d about given up when I decided to create a little text box (little compared to the main text box on the page) and create a big letter from a contrasting font. I could make a beautiful initial cap at that point—but what about the main paragraph text adjacent to that drop cap? It ran up against the text-box wall (invisible to the reader’s eye, but the positioning of the other text isn’t invisible and depending on the curls and swirls of the drop cap, those three lines next to the drop cap might not look good. Well, guess what I learned as I continued to play with that text box and the adjacent text? The designer can put text boxes on top of text boxes. Yes, in a lot of cases, it takes patience and some work—the text box you place on top of the one underneath has to be situated just right or it will move the letter/text in the box it’s overlapping, but it can be done—as any experienced user of Quark, I’m sure, already knows. I didn’t know and it was a wonderful discovery for me.

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