The QuarkXPress 4 Book (Paperback)

by David Blatner (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Completely revised and expanded, cross platform edition covers every new feature in QuarkXPress 4, including color management, scripting, and great XTensions. Paper.

From the Back Cover

For anyone serious about QuarkXPress, Òthe Blatner bookÓ is the book to have. It's the highest rated, most comprehensive, and best-selling QuarkXPress book ever published, with over 150,000 sold. Now totally updated and rewritten to cover the long-awaited QuarkXPress version 4, it includes new chapters on new QuarkXPress 4 features, such as Bezier drawing tools, long-document features, and Quark's new built-in Color Management System. ThereÕs also a new "QuarkXPress in 30 Minutes" intro chapter that helps newcomers to XPress get up and running quickly. And thereÕs a new chapter about going online with QuarkXPress that guides readers through how to take their XPress files and get them into multimedia and Web formats, including HTML, Acrobat, and QuarkImmedia.

Beginners learn all the basics, from the tools of the trade and document construction to working with text, typography, and graphics. Intermediate to advanced users will find this to be an invaluable resource to the new features of QuarkXPress and will use the book as a trusted reference. The QuarkXPress 4 Book is fully cross-platform, covering both Mac and Windows.

Product Details

• Paperback: 964 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press; Revised edition (July 13, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201696959
• ISBN-13: 978-0201696950
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #994,052 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What You Need to Know Quark, July 10, 2000

By	A.Trendl HungarianBookstore.com "RIP MJ" (Glen Ellyn, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

I'm not a designer, but I have to design in my job. I needed to know Quark, and bought this book. Best move I could've made. You should buy it.

Above everything, David Blatner is well-organized. Anyone who writes a software book will know his stuff, but getting that info from his head to mine is not always easy. Blatner makes it easy.

For example, each chapter listed in the contents gets a paragraph summary. He gets straight to the nuggets of what I need to know. No mumbo jumbo.

The first chapter is the basics. A thirty minute lesson in the important things. In Ch. 2 he elabortates on his initial information in Ch. 1. From then on, he goes bit by bit, explaining tools and typography and how text and images work together. Nothing too techie, but he respects that readers have brains as well.

Fantastic layout... he provides graphs and, better yet, the actual dialogue boxes you'll see at a particular point. There are charts galore, including a nice one on special punctuation (how to make ligatures and dagger and that ever elusive cents sign).

Among the better aspects of the book was his chapter on tools. My weakest area... and where a lot of people lack, is in knowing how the tools are fully used. My understanding of the text tools multiplied after reading about this.

I could on and on. It is a thick book. Not a quick read... typical computer book in that respect. However, when I compared it to the competition, Blatner's Quark Xpress book by far the best by for the cash.

I fully recommend this book.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars impeccable, October 18, 1999

By	Jerad Walters (Wheat Ridge, Colorado) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

David Blatner's sense of style and wit are put to excellent use in this manual for QuarkXPress, easily one the best software books on the market, and light years ahead of everything else written on Quark. Unlike other computer writers who seem to insist on demonstrating their sense of humor in every other paragraph, Blatner's observations are sometimes serious, sometimes witty, and never dull. This book is also very well designed and easy to read, which also bucks the current computer book trend. The computer software third party book industry has released the most awful prose and hideous book designs in the history of books. Blatner has gone against the grain of mediocrity and put out this insightful and quiet giant of a work. His Real World Photoshop 5, written with Bruce Fraser, continues the trend. Now if only he would replace Deke McClelland and write the definitive work on Illustrator!

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You must buy this book!, October 6, 2000

By A Customer

This was the best book I have ever read on Quark Xpress, or any other computer program for that matter. I read it from cover to cover and could hardly put it down. The information is given in a clear, concise fashion and the quick wit with which it was written makes it easy and interesting to read. It is a great starter guide for beginners, or a wonderful reference for advanced users. I recommend this book for everyone!