Quark Forums

Is it possible to change an item's blending mode, similar to the way you can in Illustrator? Is there an XT or a work-around? I particularly need colour dodge and multiply. I find transparency in Quark 8 almost useless without this and still have to use illustrator-generated lines and boxes. Feel I was mislead by Quark's boasting about transparency in Q8. If I could change blending modes in Quark I could almost throw Illustrator away! Cheers, S.

I really did type three individual paragraphs for this post - but they were published as one big block of text. Can't even get that right!

Blending is not available in QuarkXPress 8, however we did release "Shadow Caster XT" for QuarkXPress 7 on Quark Labs.

You may want to try that if you have QuarkXPress 7 too (MAC Only).

http://labs.quark.com/projectdetail.aspx?did=18

 

spaceprobe:

Is it possible to change an item's blending mode, similar to the way you can in Illustrator? Is there an XT or a work-around? I particularly need colour dodge and multiply. I find transparency in Quark 8 almost useless without this and still have to use illustrator-generated lines and boxes. Feel I was mislead by Quark's boasting about transparency in Q8. If I could change blending modes in Quark I could almost throw Illustrator away! Cheers, S.

Quark did not mislead you about transparency. There is a difference between blending and transparency. Blending simply combines layers according to the forumla of the setting you select. Transparency just adjusts the opacity of an object. QuarkXPress has no blending capability. Only transparency. The latter is in the colors palette.

XPress does have the PSD Filter which allows you to bring in PSD files and adjust layers (to a certain extent). But I don't believe it allows you to adjust blending. I mention Photoshop because I know you can export a PSD from Illy. 

Yea, yea.

I fail to see this difference as, I think, would most reasonably literate people already used to transparency as implemented in Photoshop and Illustrator.

We were told "Transparency", not "Transparency but without the blending you're used to in the other two applications you use most often".

Inventing a tenuous difference in definitions like this is weasel words. Sorry!

On a slightly different issue: Is it correct that the only way I can make a new paragraph in this forum is to type -smlrPgrtr-?

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

S.

OK. Thanks for getting back to me.

I hope it's on Quark's list of things to implement very soon.

Unfortunately I can't use Q7 because I uninstalled it.

S.

Perhaps you are right. Although my words were not intended to be "weasel words." Merely my understanding of the process. Be that as it may, XPress does not do via transparency what Illustrator or Photoshop do. Blend modes have never been offered and when Quark mention transparency was to be introduced to QXP 7.x they never said one word about blending.

Also, if you do not know already, I will mention it here. I am not a Quark employee. Sarbajit who responded first is. But I am not. This is a user to user form. Quark employees post here, but I am not an employee of Quark. Just wanted to make that clear.

Lastly if you are using Safari on Mac you will have to continue manually adding paragraphs. These forums are not Safari friendly.