Appending Settings
QuarkXPress lets you save groups of text or object formatting with a name, called styles. Styles (some people call these "presets" or "settings") aren't just for text; XPress lets you give names to special lines and dashes, hyphenation and justification settings, colors, hyperlinks, and much more. Most of the features that let you build these settings live at the bottom of the Edit menu. I'll cover how to make each of these styles in later chapters, but there's one topic about styles that I want to cover here: how to copy settings from one document to another.
You cannot copy and paste or drag-and-drop a setting itself, but you can apply a style to an object and move the object from one document to another. For instance, if you want to copy two colors, you could apply them to two objects, then copy those objects from one file to the next. However, if you need to copy a bunch of styles (paragraph styles, colors, hyperlinks, and so on) from one document to another, it's probably faster and easier to use the Append feature (under the File menu).
The Append feature lets you pick and choose any set of styles from a file on disk to copy into the currently-open document. When you select Append, XPress asks you first to pick a QuarkXPress file on disk, then it displays the Append dialog box (see Figure 3-95). To copy a style, first choose among the style types in the left column, then pick the styles you want and click the dialog box's right arrow button (or double-click the style name). You can pick more than one style from the list by Shift- or Command/Ctrl-clicking.
Figure 3-95 The Append dialog box
Append makes it easy to choose a bunch of styles—like four paragraph styles, two colors, and three special Dashes & Stripes—all in one shot.