Not exactly the greatest comeback since Lazarus (left), but I think people were finding the information useful. Therefore, I’m rehosting the site on another space, to keep the articles online.

Anyway, I’m not working in print publishing at the moment and it’s a bit difficult to keep writing QuarkXPress tips as I no longer have access to a copy. So, if anyone would like to contribute to the site, please leave a comment and I’ll see about adding you to the author list (I’ll be able to see your email address, although it won’t be displayed). It would be great to have some tips on QuarkXPress 8, InDesign and Word 2007 (assuming they’ve put any useful features in it).

Suffice to say, migrating the site was a right pain and took ages, although setting up a self-hosted WordPress site per se isn’t really that difficult. So, I guess if your site’s going to be serious, host the thing yourself in the first place.

I have a real love-hate relationship with MS Word. For composition I think it’s great and it can do uncomplicated formatting quite well. For anything else, particularly complex layouts, I think it’s a bit shit.

What I do often use in MS Word is the Styles and Formatting function and in Word 2003 it’s rotten, although I’ve kind of developed workarounds that I’d have trouble explaining to you, dear reader. I’m sure it’s worse than the previous version I remember (2000?) and I’m also convinced that Word 6.0 was the high watermark in the world of Word (though that’s going back a bit and the mind can play tricks on you…).

Anyway, is Word 2007 any better? And is it compatible with Quark? (I have this terrible thought in the back of my mind that we’d all be better off using Notepad.)

Here’s the dialog box that appears when you draw a table using the table button on the toolbox.

Filling in the rows and columns fields is self-explanatory. Selecting ‘text cells’ is probably the option you need for a standard table (the other option allows you to import an image behind, but that’s too ambitious for me).

The remaining options are essentially around importing text into your tables. For a small table, it’s probably best to enter the data yourself; for a longer one, it’s better to get the author to provide an Excel file and import that. (For an overview of importing from Excel read this post.)

Some formatting tips

Resizing rows and columns

You will have to do some manual resizing and this is done using the contents tool.

• Resizing columns vertically is a little bit idiosyncratic. Take some time to play around with this function to get used to how it works.
• The best way to set the height of rows is probably to select the row(s) and enter a number into the control box. As most rows in tables tend to be a single line in height, set this value, then resize the few rows where there is more text.

Formatting using the object tool

The following are all done using the object tool, selecting Item>Modify.

• If you’re using gridlines, you can format them all at once by selecting the Grid tab (as shown above). I usually set gridlines to 0.5pt, but that’s your choice
• Select the Frame tab and set the border to 0pt, as otherwise you get a thicker border compared to the rest of your gridlines.

Formatting using the content tool

Selecting all the cells in the table:

• Visually, I think it looks better to centre the text in tables vertically — do this by selecting ‘Centred’ on the Vertical Alignment option
• Set the text inset within the cells to an appropriate value.

Anything else?

• You can set Runaround whether you’ve selected the table with the content or object tools. This is the easiest way of offsetting the text around it
• There are obviously lots of other formatting options to play with and your use of these obviously depends on how much time you have (usually not enough) and how artistic you are (personally, not very).

Where to put tables

• Visually, you’ll really want to make the width of your table a multiple of however many columns you’re using — for example, on a two-column layout, your tables should be either one or two columns wide. Wrapping text in the middle of a column using Runaround, for example, usually doesn’t look that great
• Avoid breaking a column into two with a table. I tend to put them at the top or bottom of pages
• Tints are a good idea (for the header row for instance). I’ve found that 20% is a good minimum value. On screen, 10% often looks fine, but I’ve found it looks very faint when printed
• There’s nothing to stop you running a table across a spread if it’s very big, but do be careful, as you have to anticipate how it will look on the finished job.
• Apply runaround to the table and to the table caption, whether it’s above or below the table. Make sure your runaround settings are enough to offset all the body copy (sometimes stray lines can get lost amid tables and captions).

Some editorial considerations

• As I’ve mentioned in other postings, authors have a habit of putting tables directly below the relevant text in their MS Word files. They then refer to them as ‘the table below’ or ‘the table overleaf’ and so on. These instructions will probably be completely irrelevant once it’s typeset, so edit any copy to say ‘see Table 3’ or ‘As Table 3 shows…’ and do your best to get the table on the same page or the same spread.

Anyway, please leave a comment if a post has been helpful, if you have a question, or a suggestion for a posting. Also, as I probably ignore 50% of the features of Quark and Word, you might be able to tell me something useful.

All the best, the one-man publisher

If it’s at all possible, it can be a real timesaver in the long run to get together with authors and point them in the right direction before they start writing. And obviously, the value of preparation is in direct proportion to how long and complicated the publication is going to be. Anyway, here are some suggestions for making the process a bit less painful.

Styles and formatting

This is probably the most important thing of all — getting your authors to use the Styles and Formatting functions in MS Word saves an awful lot of time. You can use this basic template I posted on an earlier entry.

Spend ten or fifteen minutes explaining the concepts and make sure the authors understand how to use them. Even if you don’t want the numbered headings that are on the template, I would still advocate them, as they make authors think about the structure of their documents — if left alone, they tend to throw in headings willy-nilly, without thinking how they fit into the bigger picture. (And it only takes a minute to turn off all the numbering when the writing’s finished.) Updating the table of contents allows them to see how their publications are building up — hopefully saving you the bother of trying to fix the structure later.

Style guides

Your organisation will no doubt have a style guide, to encourage good writing practice and consistency. However, less-experienced authors have a tendency to be daunted by them, or to ignore them completely. The best compromise may well be to go through the most common mistakes and inconsistencies. This is especially important if a publication has multiple authors.

In my experience, the biggest issue is usually capitalisation and the second, for more technical publications, is referencing. Unfortunately you can’t stop them writing drivel, but if you’re an editor, then that’s what you’re paid for.

Graphs, images and tables

This may make you unpopular, but there are several good reasons for keeping graphs, images and tables out of MS Word files.

• Upon import into Quark, they at best get mangled and at worst disappear. And often leave stray captions in the text
• A lot of authors have a terrible habit of writing things like ‘the table below’ or ‘the graph above”, which would be fine if you were printing on a roll of paper, but useless if you’re laying out a book, especially one with columns. Removing them will hopefully remind them to cite tables and pictures properly (as in ‘see Table 3’) and also to caption them.

Images

Bitmap images in Word don’t import into Quark and placing them in Word degrades them anyway.

Graphs

How authors generate graphs isn’t of vital importance as they’ll probably need redrawing anyway. What is important is ensuring that the person creating the graph for print can see the data that was used to generate it. Despite Microsoft’s Object Linking and Embedding, a lot of Excel graphs become pictures when they’re pasted into Word.

Tables

Upon import, tables get converted into tab-separated text. In the old days, this was the only way to make tables in Quark, but nowadays it’s better to use the automatic table functions present on later versions. Unless the table is very small, I’ve actually found the best way is to get authors to do their tables in Excel which, in my experience, imports into Quark quite well (more here).

Flowcharts

Unfortunately you’re almost certainly going to have to recreate these from scratch. Sorry!

Some basic typography

Try to get authors to avoid incorrect and unnecessary formatting. Some examples are:

• Not using double spaces after full stops
• Not pressing enter twice to start a new paragraph
• No unnecessary formatting such as title pages, manual page breaks, section breaks and the like
• Not using a hyphen where a dash should go (MS Word will convert two hyphens into a dash)

Footnotes

Not that there’s anything wrong with using footnotes, but unfortunately Quark doesn’t really support them. They will import, but Quark puts them all at the end of the imported text string. If there are only a few footnotes, it’s not a massive effort to place them manually, but for a document with a lot of references, this can be very time consuming. For this reason, you might want to suggest the author puts references at the end of a section or chapter.