Some Quark keyboard shortcuts
Now, there are an awful lot of these — some requiring considerable finger gymnastics — and really too many to remember. Here, I try to list the ones I personally use the most and also list some Quark-specific formatting that may make your life easier. The following are all based on QuarkXPress 7 for PC. (I’m a bit rusty on Macs, although many of these should still work if you substitute the Cmd button for the PC’s Ctrl button.) I haven’t included shortcuts that just exist to bring up dialog boxes (although they’re obviously useful to).
This website has a pretty comprehensive list of Quark shortcuts for PC and Mac. John Brandt has produced a PDF containing a very extensive list of shortcuts, which can be downloaded from Planet Quark‘s website [link].
Typographical shortcuts
Change font size
| Increase font size through preset steps | Ctrl-Shift-. |
| Increase font size through 1pt steps | Ctrl-Alt-Shift-. |
| Decrease font size through preset steps | Ctrl-Shift-, |
| Decrease font size through 1pt steps | Ctrl-Alt-Shift-, |
Change leading
| Increase leading through 1pt steps | Ctrl-Shift-‘ |
| Increase leading through 0.1pt steps | Ctrl-Alt-Shift-‘ |
| Decrease leading through 1pt steps | Ctrl-Shift-; |
| Decrease leading through 0.1pt steps | Ctrl-Alt-Shift-; |
Change kerning
Useful when you are one word over on a column and you need to lose a line. Don’t overdo it though.
| Increase in 10/200-em steps | Ctrl-Shift-] |
| Increase in 1/200-em steps | Ctrl-Alt-Shift-] |
| Decrease in 10/200-em steps | Ctrl-Shift-[ |
| Decrease in 1/200-em steps | Ctrl-Alt-Shift-[ |
Images
| Centre image in a picture box | Ctrl-Shift-m |
| Fit image to box (keeping aspect ratio) | Ctrl-Alt-Shift-f |
Magnifying the screen
Ctrl-0 (zero) is very useful, fitting the page to the size of the screen. If you have a wheel on your mouse, you can increase or decrease the size of the page by pressing Ctrl and turning the wheel forward and backward. Otherwise, press Ctrl-Space and draw a marquee to enlarge a specific area.
Miscellaneous
A non-breaking space can be very useful; for example, if your style sheet specifies measurements should have a space preceding them (such as 5 ml or 35 g) and you don’t want them to break at the end of a line. This is achieved by typing Ctrl-5. Similarly, a non-breaking hyphen can be inserted by using Ctrl-=.
Typographically, a slash (/) should be preceded and followed by a thin space, which you can get by pressing Ctrl-Shift-8. (It’s a bit anal, but it does look nicer.)
When you’re inserting automatic page numbers on a master page the shortcut, when you’re inside a text box, is Ctrl-3.
And you all know that you should press Shift-Enter to start a new line, as opposed to Enter, which starts a new paragraph!
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