QuarkXPress™ Technical Manual Project Project Overview - Part One

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The following is a step-by step tutorial outlining how to make a technical manual suitable either for print or for screen display as an Adobe® Acrobat® PDF file (Portable Document Format). more about PDF

The project is a four page document. Below are thumbnails of the pages. Click on any page to see an enlargement:

The text of the document is of no importance. It is "lorem ipsum" nonsense. The important things are:

a.) The layout - An orderly and readable arrangement of text and graphics.
b.) The small, compact size as a PDF for easy distribution over the Internet.

This tutorial involves:
a.) Creating a new document from scratch
b.) Building master pages and linking text
c.) Importing and arranging text and images
d.) Creating new colors and applying them to objects
e.) Factors in making PDFs from Quark™ documents

An earlier tutorial mentioned the importance of planning ahead when doing any new project. Planning for distribution as a PDF drives this point home.

What You Will Need For This Tutorial

Following is an outline of what you will need to complete this tutorial:

1. First, you need a copy of QuarkXPress. This tutorial is setup for version 4.x but it could feasibly be done with version 3.x. You would just have to understand the concept of each step and work out the different commands and keystrokes.

2. Although the images used in the document will start out as GIFs, for color consistency when converting the document to PDF they need to be saved in EPS format. The bulb uses a clipping path (or mask). Adobe Photoshop® or Corel PHOTO-PAINT® will allow the saving of an EPS file with a clipping path. Adobe Illustrator®, CorelDRAW® or Macromedia® FreeHand® will allow the exporting of a masked bitmap as an EPS file. more on the equivalence of masks and clipping paths

3. For those of you who wish to output the document as a PDF, you will need a copy of Adobe Acrobat version 3.x or 4.x (not the free Reader, but the full Acrobat package).

4. All fonts used are Type 1 (PostScript®). Windows® users will need Adobe Type Manager® to use them. Although you can use any fonts you wish, these are the fonts used in this tutorial:

Document Text

You can copy the following text from your browser: Drag your mouse to select the text, then press Ctrl-C (Windows) or Cmd-C (Mac®) to copy it. Then open a new text file with Notepad (Windows) or SimpleText (Mac) and press Ctrl-V to paste the text into the file. Then save the file.

Tutorial Images

The "bulb" image:



The "screen shot" image:

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