Visual Quickstart Guide:QuarkXPress 7 for Windows and Macintosh

The book subtitle says it all: "Learn QuarkXPress the Quick and Easy Way!" If you've never picked up a Visual Quickstart Guide, you've been missing a lot. This series makes anything and everything they cover easy to learn. The abundance of graphics are very useful to the visual learner. Looking at a graphic helps to compare a window on your computer with the one in the book to know where you are and what to do.

QuarkXPress 7 is a very complicated desktop publishing program and when Quark released version 7, they touted 160 new features. I knew I was going to need as much help as possible to get me up and running with the new featuresenter VQS to the rescue. The authors, Elaine Weinmann and Peter Lourekas, collaborate seamlessly in their writing style. They are both teachers and have an unmistakable ease of transferring complicated concepts into easy to understand language.

They quote the definition of Quark from the Oxford Dictionary. However, I like the one given in the Wikipedia better, "In particle physics, quarks are one of the two basic constituents of matter (the others are the leptons). Quarks are the only fundamental particles that interact through all four of the fundamental forces." Could QuarkXPress conquer beyond the four forces? Yes, indeed. It is a central constituency for gathering the 'forces' for text, photographs, graphics, and tables.

The new features in QuarkXPress 7 are marked NEW in bold and in the margins of the book, making it easy to quickly glean through familiar sections to find the new features.

The Table of Contents and the Index are very good and very well laid out although you won't know from them what's NEW in QuarkXPress, until you read the various sections within the book.

I did a review of QuarkXPress 7 and found it difficult to put into clear words what selecting Item Knocks Out Drop Shadow meant. I found the perfect words in this book: "If checked, the drop shadow won't be visible behind areas of an item that have an opacity of less than 100%." Now why couldn't I think of that? I wrote: "Selecting Item Knocks Out Drop Shadow controls whether you see the shadow through the object or not." Mine neglects to qualify the fact that the item has to be less than 100% opacity.

For QuarkXPress users who have never experienced any of the Visual Quickstart Guides, this one belongs in your personal library. For those who are familiar and who use QuarkXPress regularly, this book cuts to the chase and clearly explains how to use the NEW features in the new version of XPress 7.

The book subtitle says it all: "Learn QuarkXPress the Quick and Easy Way!" If you've never picked up a Visual Quickstart Guide, you've been missing a lot. This series makes anything and everything they cover easy to learn. The abundance of graphics are very useful to the visual learner. Looking at a graphic helps to compare a window on your computer with the one in the book to know where you are and what to do.

Review by NCMUG member Maria O. Arguello