1. Quick 'n' Dirty Background Lines
2. Boxes with One Round Corner
3. Faking Transparency
4. More to Come!

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Quick 'n' Dirty Background Lines

Tables in which every other row is tinted are notoriously difficult to build in XPress. Here's how XPress 4's custom dashes can do the trick.

1. Select Dashes and Stripes from the Edit menu, and create a new dash.
2. In the Edit Dash dialog box, set the Repeats Every popup menu to "Points" and turn off the Stretch to Corners checkbox. Double the height of each row and type the result in the Repeats Every field. For instance, if the table rows are 14 points tall, type 28 (2 times 14).
3. Now type the height of the table's rows in the Position field and press the Add button. (In the example able, you'd type 14 and press Add.)
   
4. Save this dash with a descriptive name and apply it to a line.
5. Set the width of the line to be the same width as your table. For example, the line width might be 6" thick. Finally, change the color and the shade of the line (and the gap, if you want).

Here, a text box is sitting on top of a thick line tagged with our special dash pattern:

Boxes with One Round Corner

It's easy to make a rounded-corner rectangle in QuarkXPress. But what if you only want one or two rounded corners on a rectangle? Don't worry, almost anything is possible!

1. Use Step and Repeat to duplicate the box with zero offsets.
2. Set the Corner Radius of your duplicate box to the radius you desire (in the Modify dialog box).
   
3. Select the original box and choose the bezier box shape from the Shape submenu (under the Item menu). That's the one that looks like an oval with one part squished in.
4. Option click on the sides of the original rectangle, near the corner (but not too near). This adds points. Make sure you don't move the point accidentally!
   
5. Option-click on the corner point to delete it.
6. Finally, select both rectangles and then choose Union from the Merge submenu (under the Item menu). The result is a box with one rounded corner.
   

Faking Transparency

There's no such thing as transparency in QuarkXPress. It's not XPress' fault; PostScript itself cannot deal with transparency. Fortunately, you can fake it (which is what programs like Freehand are doing behind the scenes).

1. First, duplicate the original box and place it where the drop shadow should go, then apply a color (like 30% Black) to it. This makes it look look like a shadow over the white area, but not over the colored area.
2. Select both the background object (in this case, the pink box) and the shadow box and clone them (use Step and Repeat with zero offsets).
3. With the cloned items still selected, choose Intersection from the Merge submenu (under the Item menu). The result is a new box where the two objects had overlapped.
4. Change the color of this new box to something that simulates the shadow color. In this case, lets say the background was 20% Magenta and the shadow was 30% Black. That means you should color the new object a mixture of 30% Black and 20% Magenta. True, it's not real transparency, but it looks like it (which is good enough for now).