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XPress time-savers. (Print Publishing).

Article Excerpt
QuarkXPress 5 ($899; 800/676-4575, www.quarkxpress.com) has several features designed to make your life easier. Take XPress libraries: in these files, you can store items you use frequently, including picture boxes, text boxes, lines, and groups of objects.

Libraries are saved as external files on your hard drive. Note that a library holds page items and their contents. For example, you can place a text box containing a particular headline with a particular style in a library. But picture boxes in libraries don't fully embed their pictures. If a picture was imported with Get Picture, the library retains the link to the external file, not the file itself.

You can have more than ten libraries open at a time, and each library can hold as many as 2,000 entries. You can even label each library entry for quick access. Let's look at how all of this is done.

Manipulating Libraries

Libraries are, in many ways, just like XPress documents. Putting an item in a library is like putting it on a separate page of a document. This analogy is also true of creating and opening libraries. You can create a new library by selecting Library from the New submenu in the File menu (or by pressing **-option-N). To open a library, you select it in the Open dialog box. (The program recognizes it as a library automatically, so you don't have to do anything special.) Choose a library, and XPress brings it up on your screen...