Color, Shade, and Transparency

You can quickly and easily change the color, tint (shade), or opacity of a block of text. First, select the text and then select an option from the Color submenu, the Shade submenu, and/or the Opacity submenu. If you choose to skip the tedious menus—and who doesn’t?—there are now options for changing color, shade, and opacity at the far right side of the Classic tab and the Character Attributes tab of the Measurements palette.

If you’re on a roll working with color, use the Colors palette to set these attributes (see Chapter 14, Color). Just remember to click the Text icon so QuarkXPress knows to apply the formatting to the selected text—not the box it’s sitting in (see Figure 6-8). For Shade and Opacity, you can enter values in the fields or use the not-very-accurate sliders (those little 10 percent values that used to be there are gone).