Preview: QuarkXPress 7.0
Platform: Mac OS X 10.3/4, Windows XP
Price: TBA
Company: Quark
Minimum specs: Power PC G4/Pentium processor, 128MB total RAM, 300MB of free hard-disk space.
A major reason for the migration wasn’t just designers getting their mitts on features such as transparency, OpenType and Mac OS X support – part of the reason was Quark itself. We’ve scratched our heads in disbelief at Quark’s past behaviour – ponderous upgrades, poor customer relations, and an unwillingness to bring some of the cooler aspects of DTP to the package has helped usher in InDesign.
So the surprise release of a public beta of QuarkXPress 7 – Quark’s must-succeed response to InDesign’s growing momentum – shows a complete about-face. A more open, committed Quark is pitching an upgrade that not only mixes in the vast majority of InDesign’s features, but adds many more that could prove invaluable for the designer. Transparency, OpenType, PDF/X standards, JDF, high-resolution previews – they’re all present in version 7.
When Adobe announced that InDesign would beat QuarkXPress in the race for a Mac OS X native version, it offered a huge boost for InDesign. This time, Quark has the advantage, pledging that version 7 – slated for a Q2 release – will work natively on Apple’s new Intel-based Macs. This is a huge boon, as non-native software has to work in emulation on the new machines, with tests showing a 50 per cent slowdown. Suddenly, Quark is the DTP poster child for Apple’s move to Intel – but is it really time to kiss and make up with Quark?
The public preview release is incredibly stable and feature rich. Quark has added a raft of crowd-pleasing features, including transparency, better image-editing tools within the application, the ability to import native Photoshop files complete with background transparency, OpenType features and glyph palette, advanced tables with running headers and footers, all backed with a redesigned graphics engine dubbed XDraw.
For creative users, features such as transparency and OpenType get the most interest and comparisons with InDesign. On the transparency front, QuarkXPress edges out InDesign, allowing any item that can be assigned a colour to become transparent – meaning a frame, box, and the content can all have different transparency settings. You can set gradient blends to fade to transparent, and work with alpha channels and custom masks too.
Some of the lesser features are quietly impressive: the option to set runarounds for drop shadows will be welcomed
by InDesign users, and you can synchronize shadow attributes across a project. Disappointingly, version 7 lacks blending modes for transparency outside of supported PSD documents.
OpenType support isn’t quite as extensive as InDesign, and the glyph palette is nigh-on identical, but it ticks enough boxes to be worthwhile. There are other timesavers, too, such as the ability to embed fonts in EPS files, create ligatures on-the-fly, and the retention of picture attributes when replacing images. A Proof Output option under the View menu offers live previews of different colour spaces, such as in-RIP separations, although some settings had no effect in this beta version.
One reassuring change is the spruced-up interface. More features usually mean more palettes – but Quark has come up with a neat workaround. The Measurement palette (above) – while now depressingly massive – sports a Mac OS X Dock-like row of tabs that pop-up when you mouseover the palette. By clicking a tab, the palette changes to control attributes such as tabs (meaning an end to the hateful Tabs dialog box), runaround, text, and frame tools. There are 13 tabs in all, seriously pruning palettes. If Quark can make the measurements palette smaller, this is a sure-fire winner.
The major draw with version 7 isn’t its creative features, which pull slightly ahead of InDesign, but new additions that simply aren’t available elsewhere. QuarkXPress 7 takes collaborative working to new heights with its Composition Zone tool, letting multiple users collaborate on the same project – even the same page – simultaneously, and have the content updated live across a document.
It’s heady stuff – and curiously simple to use. You draw an area on a page, or select items to form the zone, and then add it to a new Shared Content palette. Designers can then open the same file and work on different areas of a page.
Quark has added Job Jackets, based on the Job Definition Format (JDF), which extends collaborative working by providing an XML-based rules scheme that determines all the rules and specifications necessary to describe a QuarkXPress project.
The file can include specifications for colours, style sheets, trapping, picture format and resolution, page sizes, and information such as contact details for the creative lead. Even line thicknesses and box backgrounds can be defined. It means you can send out multiple documents to different designers and ensure consistency.
Even better, Quark has adopted a version of instancing across documents. In essence, a cascade of items can be shared and synchronized across documents. By selecting an item, such as a picture box, and adding it to the Shared Content palette, you can determine which attributes are synchronized – such as frame style, background colour, and even content. When you drag items from the Shared Content palette, then make changes to one of them, all the items are updated.
World beta?
Admittedly, there are grumbles, but this has to be viewed in the context of a beta preview. The zoom level is still pegged at 800 per cent, and the PDF Export settings were strangely empty; instead of the InDesign-friendly Press or eBook options, I had to laboriously enter them by hand. Some of the effects offered no live previewing, and comparing the high-resolution images to those shown in InDesign saw QuarkXPress suffer.
High-res images looked grainy and offered some unusual colour ramping. Speed is also an issue. Exporting a PDF in this version of Quark took twice as long as InDesign (64 seconds compared to InDesign’s 32 seconds) on our test file. It was also a smidge quicker to launch Photoshop and apply a Gaussian Blur via the Edit Link feature in InDesign than it was to apply the same blur using Quark’s built-in QuarkVista image-editing tools.
On the surface, those results could prove damning, but this is a beta, and is yet to be optimized. If Quark can up the speed for the final release – which we’ll review right here – then something amazing might have happened. QuarkXPress could well be not only back in the running, but could achieve the unthinkable for InDesign fans. It might actually be the better application.
Article by Matthew Bath, DIGIT magazine © IDG 2006