Quark Forums

I have mentioned this before in this thread but since no one at Quark replied, I thought I'd re-iterate my findings.

In short, Quark included "non-editable" information inside their Style-Sheet definitions. This has caused us many griefs of late and I wanted to make sure that this was known and addressed in future versions.

Here is the scenario:
You select a piece of text and setup your type (Font, size, color, etc.) but also specify the trapping for it insuring for instance that this type should be set to overprint.

Now in good conscience, you create a character style sheet based on that selection so you can easily apply this recipe again on other text.

So far so good, productivity is better and your boss is happy (generally ).

Now arises a case where the same style now appears on a black background and it is decided that this text this text should be set in white in such case, everything staying the same.

So, being ever so professional, you make a duplicate of the original style, rename it appropriately and change its color to white.

You then go on applying your style sheets expecting everything to be fine and dandy.

The problem here is that the original character style sheet included the trapping in its style definition (even though there is nothing in the character style pane that mention anything about trapping). So in effect, you end up having all those white on black text set to overprint and this goes un-noticed until you decide to view your project plate by plate, or in our case when we got the the piece back from the printer...

The solutions here are quite simple:

• Either remove anything that we cannot edit in the "Character Style" pane from the style sheet definition.
  
• Or (preferred), add the missing elements to the "Character Style" pane so that we a) know they are there, and b) edit them when necessary.

Hello Scripting_Ace

Thank you for pointing this out – and sorry that no one had replied to your earlier post.

We have this issue in our list, however I do not know when the solution would become available (make it in the application).

We know that it is also “used” as a workaround to have a specific trapping attribute in a Style Sheet – it is useful when it is used carefully. So we cannot just disallow or remove it from the Style Sheet. Users that use this hidden attribute would specifically name the Style Sheet as “Style Sheet 1 – Overprint”, etc.

Please note: that we at Quark strive to check the Forum post as much as possible however the Forum is a “community” for thousands of QuarkXPress users with thousands of posts. We sould like to check every post however we would like everyone on the Forum to help each other by sharing knowledge and ideas. Unfortunately, we cannot check every post on the Forum and attend to them. We really appreciated your feedback however please contact our tech support if you have a specific issue which requires our attention.

Best regards,

Kaoru Uno
QuarkXPress Technical Product Management
Quark, Inc.

 Well thak you for that,

 

Kaoru Uno (Quark):

We know that it is also “used” as a workaround to have a specific trapping attribute in a Style Sheet – it is useful when it is used carefully. So we cannot just disallow or remove it from the Style Sheet. Users that use this hidden attribute would specifically name the Style Sheet as “Style Sheet 1 – Overprint”, etc.

It might only be me but this would make sense ONLY if you could apply multiple styles to any given piece of text.

This wouldn't be that bad actually and would allow for many possiblities where we could apply "partial" styles in succession. For this to work, we would also need to be able to set only a portion of the style themselves (like set the color but not the size, etc.) The ordering of that succession would determine which parameters has prority in case a propertu is declared more than once. In this case the last applied property would win.

For example, let's say I have 3 different character styles set:

1. Name: Base Type
   Font: Helvetica
   Size:12
   color: Black
2. Name:  Title
   Size:18
3. Name: Blue Text
   color: Blue

This would be a title (Base Type + Title)

Followed by some body text  (Base Type)  that could sometime be colored  (Base Type + Blue Text)

Of course, the title too could be set in blue  (Base Type + Title + Blue Type) 

 

Hope this helps!