Review: QuarkXPress 7 beta
- Article 5 of 9
- Computer Arts, March 2006
Will the latest Quark be enough to stop InDesign defections?
Quark is the company every print designer loves to hate. Irregular software updates with minimal new features, ridiculous prices, customer service and support reps that seem to have malicious personality disorders: the list goes on. But with InDesign now a valid alternative to QuarkXPress, Quark is cleaning up its act.
QuarkXPress 7, still in beta, has a list of new features as long as your arm, designed to make you pause for thought before completing your InDesign escape tunnel. Most of them are the kind of minutiae and interface tweaks you'd expect from a product that's been around for over a decade and aren't very exciting. While the majority help with everyday productivity, others actually hinder.
Nevertheless, there are some genuinely big standout features worth having. Being able to have more than one user working on the same document is going to be a godsend for many publishers, even if the implementation is a little cumbersome. It might even be the single best reason for sticking with XPress. Built-in drop shadows, transparencies, alpha channel support and JDF workflows for job management are very welcome and a whole lot better than InDesign's equivalents, even if they could be more intuitive. There's also plenty of catch-up being played, with some decent OpenType support finally making the cut and taking Quark's typography features way above InDesign's surprisingly poor implementations.
While it doesn't quite have the Creative Suite integration of InDesign, the new features won't quite complete your wish list and performance is poor on G4s, QuarkXPress is once again the game in town that everyone has to beat. Don't jump ship just yet.