I tend to use the text inset option in Quark quite a lot. You can also create white space around your text by placing a text box within another box but the text inset option allows you to specify exactly how much you want to leave, making the final publication a bit neater.

On this example below you can see that the text is flush to the frame giving it a rather untidy and squashed appearance.

You can access the text inset option through the Modify menu either by selecting Modify from the item menu or by pressing Apple M. The inset option is found in the text tab as shown in the picture below.

Here you can specify whether you want multiple insets by ticking the text box. If you leave the text box un-ticked then the same inset will be applied to each side of your text box. Generally I prefer to specify multiple insets because I find you tend to end up with too much space at the bottom otherwise. After entering the values you require click apply and ok and you can see that the text in the box now has a nice even white space around it leaving it room to breathe within its frame.

I'm posting this mainly because I have to look it up each time I want to create a screenshot on the Mac. Just hold down Apple, Shift and 3 and if you have your sound turned on you will hear a camera click noise as you take a shot of the screen. My Mac seems to save it as default on the desktop.

It occurred to me the other day how useful I find the library function in Quark. It certainly saves me a lot of time. Basically the feature allows you create a library which you can then open up with any document. The library palette sits to one side as shown below on the right. Any element that you use frequently can simply just be dragged into the library so you don’t have to spend time creating it from scratch next time you want to use. I generally use the function for house filler adverts that appear in the publication most weeks.

If you want to select a lot of text but can't see all of it for example when it runs off the page, this tip is useful. I use it when I import a large amount of text into a Quark document and need to change the point size or font style. Just position the cusor before the text you want to select and hold down Apple, Alt, Shift and the down arrow key. This selects all the text from the point where your cusor is postioned to the end of the document. It's different from using the select all command because that option will select everything in the document, wheras with this command you have more control over the selection and any text before the selection point can remain untouched.

I know this is not strictly design related but decided to post it here mainly because it is Mac related and it took me so long to fix the problem. I use Entourage on my Mac mini as my email program and for the last couple of years it has been working fine with no problems. I started having trouble on Friday when my Mac could not connect to the email server. After a while I discovered that although I could receive emails, I couldn’t send anything. Generally I assume a problem like this is an issue with the Macs preferences being corrupted or it losing some of the network settings, as sometimes happens. After running a cleaning programme to fix any corrupted preferences and checking and re-entering all the network settings, I still had the problem. My husband at this point assured me that there was no problem with my Mac and that the issue was with the exchange server. After contacting the person who maintained the server and finding there were no problems that end, I was out of ideas. Then a rather helpful tech support guy gave me a call. After ten minutes he worked out that the problem was the Mac had switched the default account it was using. By this I mean it was trying to use another account to send emails. The fix, a simple click of a button to set the right email account as default and everything worked. Very simple, when you know how, but frustrating because it took so long to find the problem.

I always work with the invisible characters turned on in Quark, mainly because I find it easier to see whether there are any double spaces in the text or if a document contains soft or hard returns. I do find that sometimes I need to switch them off to get a good view of the layout. You can do this by pressing the apple key and I.

I spend a lot of time zooming in and out of documents when using Quark so I use the magnifying glass tool a lot. One shortcut that I find useful is to hold down the alt key when you have the tool selected. This automatically allows you switch between zooming in and out. Another useful shortcut is to press the apple key and 0 to view the whole page.

While working on my Mac mini the other day I encountered an easily fixed but very irritating problem. When I tried to load my creative suite programs (Photoshop CS, Illustrator, In Design etc) they all failed to load. Instead they got to the stage where they were initializing and then just hung. After reloading creative suite and many hours of frustrating research trawling through forums looking for a solution I finally found an off the wall fix. Apparently if you change the time zone in the Macs settings and then restart the computer everything will work. I must admit to being very sceptical about whether this would solve my problem but after nearly 3 hours of trying to fix the problem I was on the verge of throwing my Mac out of the window. So try it I did. After changing the time zone from London to Dublin, restarting the computer and then changing it back to London again everything was back to normal and Creative Suite worked as usual.