Quark has a handy function which allows you to create interesting effects with text. With the text box option there are only limited options. You can apply colours to the text but the “text to box” function enables the use of blends. To use it first create a text box and type your text in the size and font that you wish to use.  This example I have Apple Chancery. From the style menu choose the text to box option. A duplicate of your text is created.  The difference is that the created text is no longer treated as text but as a picture box and now has all the functions associated with this. You can now delete the original text and apply colours and blends to your picture box. In this example I have applied a linear blend of blue and red.

To add a drop cap in Quark use the format box under the style menu (Apple key and F). Tick the drop cap box so the options become available. The character count option specifies how many characters you wish to drop. In this example I have chosen to set the first two characters as drop caps, so I would put a 2 in the this box. The second option specifies how many lines of text the drop cap will take up. You can set this from 2 lines to 16 lines. In my example I have set this to 3 so the drop cap will take up 3 lines of normal text. Once you have set the options click apply to make the changes.

It might come as a surprise to users of programs such as Word but Quark does not have the ability to produce automatic bullet points. There are two way to create the actual bullet point. You can either press the alt (option) key and 8. This creates a small bullet point but it can be a little hard to resize it in proportion to the text as it doesn’t always line up very well the text. Personally I prefer to use the Zapf Dingbats font and simply type a lower case l (L). This produces a bullet point that can be easily resized in the measurements palette in the font size section.

The other problem with bullet points in Quark is that when the text runs onto two lines it does not automatically indent. To combat this problem I insert a tab on the first line of the text after the bullet. Then simply use the format menu to set a left indent also set a first line indent but set it as a minus number. For example if your left indent is set to 5mm set your first line indent to minus 5 mm. This will have the effect that the bullet point is set back flush with the left margin of your text box and the text will be neatly lined up underneath each other.

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.