Quark Forums

Hi, Can anyone tell me how I change the default preferences in Apply Drop Shadow? Thanks

As far as I know, you can't -- and I've been begging for this since Quark first added the feature. Better, yet, I've been asking for Drop Shadow styles (which could EASILY bee added to Item Styles) to save and quickly re-use settings.

 It's ridiculous -- EVERY time I've ever made a drop shadow, I've had to go in and edit settings (e.g., 75% opacity looks nice onscreen, but it's way too dark for print). I use lots of drop shadows (I do lots of display ads for directories) -- thousands of mouse clicks that could be eliminated if Drop Shadows were included in Preferences and Item Styles.

 

I've never had a response from Quark on this. I love Quark XPress, but sometimes they can be soooo backward in their stubbornness re: leaving in old, counter-productive methods.

 

Sorry for the rant; this one's a sore spot for me (and don't get me started on how you STILL can't change Runaround on more than one box at a time!!!!)  

Jeez, stood on a live one there!!! Anyway, thanks for letting me know. Thought I was going mad not being able to suss it out.

 Yeah, I'm like the salesman who gets his foot in the door: "Drop shadow? Did you say drop shadow? Let me give you my drop shadow rant..."

Something that might save you a bit of time Tremo. Make a box with the shadow values you want. Go to File > New > Library. Name it and save somewhere safe! Drag and drop the box into the library and there it is ready to be dragged and dropped whenever you need it. And if you use lots of different values then you can drag and drop multiple times into the one library or make multiple libraries. This should save as part of a Palette Set too. Any use?

 Thanks for the suggestion, wombat -- I will make a few Drop Shadow Library items, and it will save time. But I still want Quark to give us Drop Shadow Styles!

Hi, tremolounge,

I am of course not happy to read that you think Quark is stubborn. Let me assure you that we take all feature requests seriously and that this is not the impression we intended to give.

Having set quality as the number one priority means that we need to prioritize feature requests and then decide which ones we can implement in a release. Building priorities unfortunately can mean that some feature that are important for your specific workflow are being delayed.

XPert Tools (and wrote this before) are an example: We implemented the most important ones (and you might disagree with the priorities which are based on customers' feedback in focus groups), the remaining ones will follow. 

And we heard you about shadow styles, please be a bit patient. In the meantime the workaround using libraries is a good suggestion.

Best
Matthias

Thanks for the reply, Matthias -- Shadow Styles will be a huge time saver for me! 

Hello, We just upgraded to 7.5 in our office and I found this forum post regarding drop shadow preferences and item styles because we are having similar issues and I was curious as to whether anything has changed in the year since this original post? I've run all the updates I could find and have searched extensively for a way to change the default settings or the ability to add drop shadow to the item styles with zero luck. Thanks for your time! Shawn

Hi, gvilleprod,

Item Styles with Drop Shadows is possible from QuarkXPress 8.1 and onwards.

Best regards
Matthias