by Jay Nelson

If your QuarkXPress 7 files are growing in size at a rapid rate, check to see if Auto Save is enabled.

If so, disable it. Quark is working on a fix.

http://www.planetquark.com/

by Jeff Gamet

The drop shadow applied to an item in QuarkXPress doesn’t rotate when you rotate the item.

This makes sense, because the drop shadow needs to maintain its relationship to the virtual source of light, which has not rotated.

http://www.planetquark.com/

Understanding Master Pages and Numbering with QuarkXPress

Ever wondered how to use Master Pages in QuarkXPress to their full capabilities? Well take a look at this wonderful article that I came across from Planet Quark.com. This article, written by Robert Underwood, explains the mysteries of Master Pages in a concise and well-written style.

Follow this link to get the most out of your Masters!

Mastering Master Pages

Also - be sure to head to PlanetQuark.com for all the latest news on QuarkXpress.

Enjoy - Shellie

If you use your USB flash drive only with Macs, you may be able to increase its speed by changing its format to Mac OS. Just like any other drive, flash drives can be formatted for use on either Windows or Macs, and almost always arrive formatted for Windows. (Macs can read Windows-formatted drives, but Windows requires a third-party utility to read a Mac-formatted drive.)
You can use Apple’s Disk Utility (in Applications:Utilities) to reformat the drive for Macs. Under the Erase tab, choose Mac os Extended from the Volume Format pop-up menu. You can also give it a name - using your phone number is a good option in case you lose it. When you click the Erase button, all the data on the drive will be erased and the drive will be formatted for Mac OS.
The next time you copy files to or from the drive, you should see a speed improvement.

The Adobe Creative Suite 3 installer for Version Cue CS3 Server disables your Mac’s firewall so that it can configure new outgoing network ports, but it does not reactivate the firewall when it is finished — potentially leaving your Mac open to malicious attacks.

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“We’ve heard from our members that remote support continues to be one of their favorite pieces of technology not only for increasing satisfaction but for upping the productivity of their agents,” said John Ragsdale, VP of Research for the Society for Service and Support Professionals (SSPA). But with so many remote support products on the market, how do you choose the right solution? A new webcast from Bomgar(TM) answers your questions.

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One in five people is now packing a laptop on vacation. Small business owners are especially likely to bring their computers on vacation, with 75 percent checking in by phone or e-mail at least once a day while on vacation. In addition, nearly half of small business owners consider downtime a guilty pleasure, forcing nearly one third to check in by phone or e-mail several times a day while on vacation.

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Design is all around us, it is impossible to avoid. Everything that surrounds us has been designed - from the paperclip and the iPod, to our homes and the way we live. “Design: Intelligence Made Visible” is epic, opinionated, comprehensive in scope and forms the definitive statement on design for this century. Written by Stephen Bayley, one of the world’s best known commentators on modern culture and Terence Conran, one ofthe world’s leading designers and arbiters of taste, this book pays tribute to the leading names, movements, materials and processes such as furniture, fashion, cars, graphics, products, signs and symbols. The book combines essential facts with authoritative opinions - everything, as the industrial designer Raymond Loewy once said, from a lipstick to a steamship - butbrought right up to date. A series of essays begin by introducing how design has its place in modern cultural history including Terence Conran’s definition of design. The main section of the book comprises an A-Z of iconic people, products and processes from 20th century to the present day with biographies of leading designers from pastand present, as well as corporate histories, product appraisals, and witty accounts of relevant management, cultural and social theories. A major appendix has Bayley and Conran assessing the up and coming designers of today and finally a chapter on branding concludes with a provocative methodology to assess brand value. Beautifully designed and beautifully written, “Design: Intelligence Made Visible” is simply the indispensable guide to the contents of the modern world.
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Explore the many powerful tools in Adobe® Illustrator® CS3 and discover techniques for creating vivid, engaging, and imaginative visual effects in this online course by Corey Barker, education and curriculum developer for NAPP and contributing writer for Layers magazine.

This class is perfect for graphic designers and digital artists who want to unlock the incredible potential of Illustrator CS3, and take their work to a whole new level of creativity. Adobe® Illustrator® CS3 Down & Dirty Tricks is the fastest and easiest way to learn the fundamental tips and tricks you need to become a vector graphics guru.

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xTrain™ has created a fusion of network quality television production, expert trainers and solid instructional design to create a truly unique online learning experience. The world’s premier experts in their respective fields stream directly to the viewer’s computer via the xTrain™ learning platform. xTrain’s mission is to revolutionize the online learning space by creating the world’s most instructionally sound online training platform and learning environment. xTrain™ leverages an Emmy Award winning production crew, a $5.5 million dollar television production studio and the industry’s leading experts to create a new category of online learning.

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iYogi, a leading independent provider of personalized computer support services, announced today that it has extended its service offerings to include installation and troubleshooting support for printers and multi-functional devices. iYogi, based in India, offers low-cost computer support services to individuals and small offices via phone and remote online access. iYogi’s service plans range from $89.99 a year for unlimited PC support and maintenance to $24.99 for pay-per incident support.

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Photographer’s Handbook: An Easy Workflow focuses on the critical elements of the workflow rather than covering every arcane feature. This Handbook is designed to get you working quickly in Photoshop. It provides the essential information for image editing along with step-by-step projects for more advanced Photoshop techniques.

Use the Photoshop CS3 Photographer’s Handbook to:

* Gain a solid foundation toward understanding the tools and processes used to edit photographs using Photoshop CS3
* Learn a practical workflow for editing images — including organizing images, clean-up, basic image editing, editing with selections, and applying effects
* Learn individual techniques for image editing by following simple step-by-step instructions for each technique
* Learn photographic techniques for image editing — like removing blue casts from shadows, blending images together, and correcting skin-tones

Photoshop CS3 Photographer’s Handbook: An Easy Workflow is 208 page, paperback book selling for USD$35.95

Packt is pleased to announce a new book on designing Joomla! templates. Written by Tessa Blakely Silver, Joomla! Template Design is a complete guide for web designers to all aspects of designing unique website templates for the free Joomla! PHP Content Management System.

The Joomla! template is a series of files within the Joomla! CMS that controls the presentation of content. A template is the basic foundation design for viewing a Joomla! website. To produce the effect of a “complete” website, the template works hand in hand with the content stored in the Joomla! databases.

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New white paper “How to Avoid a Data Disaster: Computer Security for Service Contractors” details the realities of computer failure and what it could mean for your business.

While computer hackers and viruses often garner the most attention in the realm of computer threats, many contractors overlook the countless ways that physical damage can adversely impact their business. Computer hardware failure, power surges, and/or damage from flood or fire could destroy years of work orders, contacts, accounting records and more. In an instant, your business could find itself having to recreate information that took years to accumulate.

A new white paper - “How to Avoid a Data Disaster: Computer Security for Service Contractors” - addresses physical computer security concerns for contractors. The white paper is is now available free of charge and can be downloaded at:
http://www.databasics.com/white-paper/contractor-security-white-paper.html .

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Today O’Reilly announced that computer graphics wizard and author Deke McClelland updates his bestselling hands-on instructional tome for Adobe Photoshop CS3. As with previous editions, Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One guides readers step by step through the program’s features and functionality. A key appeal of the One-on-One series is the two hours of DVD-video material included. Once you read about a particular technique, you can see how it’s done first hand in the video. The combination is uniquely, effective and hugely popular.

The 544 page Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One sells for USD$49.99 (cheaper on Amazon.com from the link above).

Some users are having trouble installing Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 if they had already installed the Photoshop CS3 Beta. To avoid possible trouble, uninstall the beta by using Adobe’s uninstaller, found in Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers. If that doesn’t help, Adobe has a useful free utility called CS3Clean that should fix the problem. CS3Clean removes the Adobe support files that the standard uninstallation process leaves behind. This is a last-ditch-effort utility and should be used only if you haven’t been able to get your CS3 applications to install any other way. Get it at www.adobe.com/support/contact/cs3clean.html /  Content provided by Design Tools

Acrobat 8 lets you split a window to view multiple pages of a document, each at its own zoom level. Choose Window> Split to add a new horizontal pane to the current window. You can also create a new pane by clicking just above the active area on the vertical scroll bar. To adjust the dimensions of the panes, drag the horizontal splitter bar. To remove a pane, choose Window> Remove Split or click on the horizontal splitter bar.

To create four panes instead of two, choose Window> Spreadsheet Split.
Taz Tally

If you aren’t sure whether an application is running natively on your new Intel-based Mac or is operating in the Rosetta emulation environment, there are a couple of ways to check.
Highlight the application icon in the Finder.
Choose File> Get Info, or press Command-I.
Look for “Kind” under the General section. If it says “PowerPC,” it runs in Rosetta. If it says “Universal Binary,” it runs natively.

You can also use System Profiler to check all of your applications at once.
Choose Apple menu> About this Mac.
Click the More Info button.
Select Applications in the left hand column. It’s under the Software heading.
Once System Profiler creates a list of every application on your hard drive, look for the Kind column. It shows if each application is PowerPC or Universal Binary.
You can click the heading in the Kind column to sort your applications so all of the Universal Binaries are grouped together.

We had a discussion about this on Inside Mac Radio the other day. Here’s the basic idea. When you first set up a multi-page document in Indesign, you are asked to decide if you want it as facing pages or not. Odds are, you will. That’s why you’re using Indesign and not Word. You want this thing to have a page layout. But, unless you’re going to a professional offset printer for your multi-page project, or even if you just need to get a readable proof to a client, you won’t want to have that single first page hanging out there in your layout.
So here’s a simple way of making a facing page layout, using spreads, that you can keep as a template for future use.

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With its easy access to special characters and codes, QuarkXPress® 7 makes perfecting your typography simple. New interface improvements in QuarkXPress 7 let you insert special characters without looking up keyboard commands or resorting to third-party software. Plus, you can display the full range of invisible characters, including discretionary hyphens, em spaces, and nonbreaking spaces. In addition, invisible characters scale appropriately according to the point size and view percentage you select. As a result, the dot that displays for a space looks different at 10 points than it does at 60 points — and it looks different at 100% than it does at 500%. To insert a special character, choose Utilities>Insert Character and then choose the special character to insert on your page. To view the new symbols for invisible characters, choose View>Invisibles.