Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Desktop Publishing
with Xara Xtreme
Although Desktop Publishing (DTP) seems today to have been supplanted by Website
creation (HTML), the two arts share a core trait—the designer takes text and graphics
and organizes them into an understandable presentation. Happily, Xara Xtreme has publishing
features that accommodate both printed and virtual pages; often, a page layout can be re-purposed
to use as a Web page. This chapter takes you through the art of good page design—how to
arrange elements in a way that graphics don't fight the text and everything has a level of visual
importance so the most important things strike the reader first, as you intend it. First, you'll lay
out a small restaurant booklet-style standing menu intended for personal printer output, and then
you'll move on to the more ambitious task of designing a page layout for a magazine. You'll learn
invaluable tricks through the course of the tutorials, and with what you gain through experience,
you'll be able to adapt the steps to just about any assignment of your own.
Download and extract the contents of Chapter09.zip, which contains everything you need to
work through this chapter's tutorial steps. Install the fonts on your system.
What's on the Menu Today?
Whether it's a 4-star restaurant, or a Mom and Pop roadside eatery, presentation is everything:
the staff uniforms, the way the food is arranged on the plate, and especially the menu—the first
thing a customer notices after being seated. Let's suppose in this section that you have a client
(or you are the client) who runs a small, limited-menu restaurant, and the restaurant is bound for
larger things, perhaps a franchise or more expensive location in the future.
A booklet style layout for the menu is the ticket here. Open a new file in Xara, press
CTRL
-
SHIFT
-
O
for Options, click the Page Size tab, choose U.S. Legal from the Paper Size drop-down list, and then
