Here are some things to bear in mind.

Your printer is your friend

Printers are always touting for work, so use this to your advantage. By this, I mean you can get representatives to visit your office to discuss specifications and paper stocks, get them to put together mock-ups of projects and ask for assistance with your technical settings, such as PDF output and bleed.

Also, what goes around comes around. The people in the print room will appreciate it if you send hassle-free jobs. If there isn’t a binding deadline on a job let them know, as it will help them plan their schedules more effectively. Save up some favours for when you genuinely are in a hole and you need genuine help with a tight deadline or a sudden change in the job specs.

More than one way to skin a cat

There are realistically three options around how you send a job. This is dependent on which version of Quark you’re running.

Send native Quark files

Here, you use QuarkXPress’s Collect for Output feature, which will output native files with all appropriate images, illustrations, fonts and Xtensions. This was the usual option years ago and it can still be done, but bear in mind the following:

• It’s probably the most time-consuming option
• Your printer may charge you extra to process the files
• If you’re using a PC and your printer is Mac based, there is the possiblity of incompatibilities
• You may end up with several very large files, which may be too big to email or take a very long time to upload to a printer’s FTP site, if they have one. You may possibly have to put the job on a CD and physically send it to the printers.

Having said that, if your volumes are fairly low and your jobs are simple and predictable, it’s still an option.

Use Quark’s PDF generator

I think this feature first appeared in version 6.0. Now, I personally avoided for several reasons – I already had Adobe Acrobat, I’d heard indifferent things about it and one of my printers warned me it had caused problems for them.

Having said that, I have heard that this capability has improved somewhat in version 7. My honest answer is that I don’t know – my recommendation would be to check out some discussion boards and ask your printers what their experiences have been. Maybe someone will post a comment below. (Note: I posted this question on Planet Quark, who provided a helpful reply. Again, it’s something to check with your printer.)

Use Adobe Acrobat

This is my preferred option – the ubiquity of PDFs means that it’s a very difficult program to do without anyway. It also gives you a lot more control over the outputted job, has several useful features for optimising publications for the web and several useful file conversion options.

I personally use Quark to generate PostScript files, then distill them to PDFs using preloaded settings sent to me by my printers. It works well for me and I’ll go into more detail in later posts, but it’s not the only way to do it.

Paper and colour

Paper stocks, weights, coating and binding options are best discussed with your printer. If you’re spending enough money, you may even get a free lunch into the bargain.

Colour takes a lot more thought. The most likely options for printing are one, two and four-colour.

One-colour printing

This is almost always going to be black ink, and therefore one plate at the printers, so the cheapeast option. It’s also technically the least difficult. If you’re only ever giong to print in black and white, then it’s unlikely you’ll actually need to buy any expensive desktop publishing software at all – you could probably manage with your copy of (gulp) Microsoft Publisher that comes with Microsoft Office and send the jobs as PDFs.

Two-colour printing

My preferred option for standard publications. This is realistically black plus a single Pantone colour (although other spot colour models are available). I think, done well, two-colour printing greatly adds to the visual appeal of bog-standard publications and is worth the extra money over one-colour printing. Or a two-colour cover can brighten up a book with only black insides.

Two-colour work is also the most technically fiddly in my experience – especially if you’re bringing in photos and illustrations from other programmes – although later tutorials will give suggestions to try and make it as painless as possible.

Four-colour printing

Full colour – cyan, magenta, yellow and black plates. Nice, of course, but also the most expensive.

Realistically, you’re going to want to confine full-colour to things such as leaflets, brochures and newsletters, along with book and document covers. Remember, there’s nothing to show off your design ability (or lack of) like filling a page with colour.

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.

The bread and butter of QuarkXPress isn’t that difficult, but you need to know where to draw the line. Bring in a designer when you need;

• Templates to follow, for example layouts for insides of books and for newsletters
• Book covers
• Design-intensive projects, such as annual reports and other mass market publications
• Promotional material

It’s really worth the cash, honest.

As you can see, I’ve kept the file as simple as possible (and the Word formatting is irrelevant to what the final Quark layout will look like anyway). It was created in MS Word 2003 — it will open on a PC, I’ve opened it in OpenOffice without any problems and it should open on Word for Macintosh. What you need to do is to get your authors to follow the template as closely as possible.

At the top of the page is an automatic table of contents. It’s generated from the headings in the document — to update it, periodically right click within the TOC and select Update Field. (You can choose to update the page numbers or the whole TOC.)

The document has been put together using Word’s Styles and Formatting features, which can be displayed using the View>Styles and Formatting menu. I’ve prefixed the names with “TOMP” for the simple reason that it keeps the styles together when they get listed in alphabetical order.

So, the principle is straightforward — write some text, click on the style in the right-hand pane and all the formatting is done for you.

You’ll notice the headings are numbered and there are two reasons for this. Firstly, numbered headings are useful if you’re producing a long, more technical document that will be cross-referenced. Secondly, it forces authors to think about the structure of their documents, as in my experience, they usually tend to throw in headings and subheadings at random. If you don’t want them in your final publication, it’s very quick and straightforward to turn the numbering off.

It is possible that you might need to alter the look of the Word document. Let’s say you want to make the Level A headings red. The easiest way is to recolour one of the headings red, go to the Level A style in the right-hand pane, click the drop-down box and select ‘Update to match selection’. All the Level A headings will now be red.

I have to be honest, this feature in Word can be a real pain, although despite all the glitches with it, it’s still worth sticking with. MS Word often invents new, irrelevant styles, which quickly fill up the right-hand pane. The only way to get rid of them is to click on the ‘Show’ drop-down box right at the bottom of the Styles and Formatting pane, then select ‘Custom’. You can then just display the ones you need — in this template, just the ones preceded by ‘TOMP’.

However, even with this layout, you will need to impress on your authors (and maybe yourself) several things:

• This template essentially formats itself, in terms of spaces between headings and paragraphs. Don’t start a new paragraph by hitting return twice. If you really need a new line, do a manual line break (Shift-Return)
• Using bold and italics is fine (although from an editorial point of view, too much bold text is best avoided)
• Don’t use double spaces after full-stops
• Set up the Autocorrect options on Word to ensure hyphens are converted into dashes and three dots into ellipses. It’s a good idea to turn off the automatic hyperlinks as well
• There is a style for doing normal numbered lists. There is one thing to look out for — if, for example, you’ve numbered three paragraphs 1-3, then start another numbered list later in the document, the numbering will start at four. To get round this, right-click the relevant paragraph and select ‘Restart numbering’
• Stick to the preset styles absolutely — of course you may need a few more paragraph styles, but set these up in the Styles and Formatting as opposed to doing them manually
• Avoid things like page breaks and section breaks
• If possible, put tables, graphs, figures and images in separate files. Big tables can be done in Excel and imported into Quark. Graphs will probably have to be redrawn (and won’t import into Quark anyway).
  At best, things like this will disappear on import; at worst, they’ll just get mangled, interrupt the flow of text and have to be removed.

Once you or your author has finished the document, it can be imported into Quark using Get>Text. Ideally, you’ll have set up styles in Quark with identical names and they’ll get converted to their new formats.

Before you do, however, please read my posts here and here, which address some issues with importing text and show how to fix some glitches.

For more advice on MS Word, Shauna Kelly’s site is very comprehensive.

Columns are used to improve page composition and readability and also mean you get more text on a page. However, if they’re too wide or too narrow, you’ll only succeed in reducing reading speed (which is why you’ll hardly ever see a column spanning the width of an A4 page in a typeset book, although it seems to be quite normal for Word publications produced in offices). The author was insisting the publication should be A4, with one very wide column.

Now there aren’t any exact rules on this, but some searching on some typography websites suggest a reasonable rule of thumb was not to exceed 60 characters or 12 words in a column.

In these examples of single column layouts on an A4 page, both pages follow these general rules — page 1 of the PDF is set in 12pt Frutiger and page 2 in 10pt Frutiger.

Page 1 looks fairly okay, although 12pt seems slightly large for this particular typeface, for what is essentially a reference book. Page 2 has a lot of unnecessary white space on either side and it would make sense to make the book smaller if you wanted to use this point size.

We eventually compromised on 11pt Frutiger over two columns, which you can see here. The Quark master page I set up for this project is essentially the same as the one I showed how to set up in this article.

It was interesting to see that turning on Quark’s automatic hyphenation made little difference to the total number of pages, although you would probably have to use hyphenation if you wanted fully justified columns. If you were typesetting very narrow, newspaper-style columns then it would be essential.

In this example, I’m putting together an A4 book with two columns of text. In Quark 7, selecting File>New>Project will give you this dialog box:

The size of the page uses the A4 letter preset, but you can obviously put in any value. Columns are set to two and the gutter (the distance between columns) is set to 5mm. Be sure to select Automatic Text Box, which will create new pages automatically when you import text.

In the Margin Guides settings, I’ve left a good space on the left margin — if a book is fairly thick, you won’t be able to see about 10mm of the left hand margin anyway as it won’t lie flat. Select Facing Pages for a symmetrical layout.

Don’t worry about the exact measurements yet, as you can always change them at a later stage.

Section Start allows you to define where page numbers start. If a book is heavy on imported images, it may make sense to split it into separate files and you’ll need to use this. However, I’ve worked on text-based 100-page books in a single file without too much trouble.

Once you’re happy, press OK. Here’s what you’ll end up with on screen (click to enlarge):

If you want to alter the margins — and you can do so at any stage — right click the master page icon on the Page Layout box and select Master Guides.

What you’ll then need to do is add any repeating elements. You’ll probably want to put running heads on the top margins and maybe a graphic element. To get automatic page numbering, draw a text box, click on the content tool and press Ctrl-3. The <#> symbol will appear.

You may well want to put successive chapter headings as running heads on the right hand pages. To do this, simply right-click the master page icon and select copy. Double-click the new icon to display the new master page, then replace the old chapter head with the new one. To apply the new master page, drag the icon over the page icons, which will change from A to B.

Here’s a PDF of a spread I did based on a very similar master page.

Mac or PC?

This is a real old chestnut — before I start on this can I say that I’ve no axe to grind either way. I’ve used Macs and PCs professionally and I’m writing this post on an old laptop running Linux. However, people can get very hot and bothered on this particular subject.

The simple answer is, it probably doesn’t matter. It’s very difficult to avoid having to output PDFs these days and if you’re sending print jobs as PDFs, your printer will generally not be bothered where they came from, as long as you’ve done it correctly.

Now, chances are you’re in an office on a PC network and your current set-up may be perfectly capable of running all the desktop publishing software you need. If you’re on a Mac network, then the same applies. Bear in mind that your PC network manager may not be prepared to have a Mac on the network, or may just not have experience of them.

On the basis of cost alone, if you’re buying equipment from scratch, the economics favour a PC. However, if you’re likely to be regularly swapping files with out-of-house designers — who will probably be working on Macs — it makes sense to get a compatible system. If you want to save money by sending native files instead of PDFs, then a Mac would make sense again, but as I’ve said, Adobe Acrobat is difficult to live without.

If you’re a Linux guru, you may well be running PC software through Wine — in that case, then you’re very clever and probably don’t need to read this website.

My specifications

I work on a PC running QuarkXpress 7 on Windows XP SP2. According to the System menu, it has a 3GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 502MB RAM. It would probably benefit from 1GB of RAM, as it can struggle sometimes when several programmes are running, but it’s generally okay. I’d say you’d need a 17″ screen as a minimum.