Review: QuarkXPress 7.0

• Article 22 of 89
• MacFormat, June 2006
• View the original article online

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QuarkXPress is one of the oldest Mac programs there is. The page layout program used, until recently, by virtually every publishing company in the world, it’s the standard tool for journalists, editors, designers, marketers and just about anyone who needs to put out a professional-looking piece of print design.

The fact it’s still the standard is remarkable. Adobe has tried, first with the revamped PageMaker it bought from Aldus and then with the home-grown InDesign, to knock QuarkXPress from its perch with only moderate success. It’s a testament to QuarkXPress’s ease of use and entrenchment that despite Quark’s virtual hostility to its users and the exorbitant price tag attached to XPress that it’s still number one.

Nevertheless, InDesign has been making inroads, initially by offering a lower price tag, but with the latest version CS2, with technical superiority. Quark has had to fight back, first by improving its own act and listening to its users rather than treating them with distain and second by releasing QuarkXPress 7.

This latest version of XPress has a whole raft of new features that claw back some of InDesign’s technical lead. In all, there are 160 wizzy things that Quark 7 can do that the previous versions couldn’t (at least, not without XTensions). However, many of these are the kinds of features that only huge, well organised publishing houses will want, such as database-driven publishing using PPML and JDF workflow/“Quark Job Jackets” support – which you probably won’t find in use in a more than a couple of small publishers in the country, now or for some considerable time to come. While the colour management system, always a far stronger point in XPress than InDesign anyway, has had a massive make-over as well, too few people have even started on proper colour management for this to be an attraction in the majority of publishing companies, although ad agencies, brochure makers and other sticklers for colour will certainly be pleased. Since it’ll be largely the biggest publishers that can afford to upgrade to Quark 7, the fact that most new features are geared towards their needs is no big surprise.

Other features are simply additions that Quark needed in order to catch up with InDesign. The ability to specify transparency in elements, proper Unicode and OpenType support, drop shadows for elements, styles for PDF output: anyone with InDesign will be experiencing a strong sense of déjà vu as they read through much of the features list. In some ways, particularly in the way it deals with transparency, however, XPress’s handling of these additions is better than InDesign’s, so we can’t accuse it of simply copying Adobe.

But there are quite a number of new features that will both improve – and in some cases hinder – the life of the average XPress user. Probably the most obvious is the interface clean-up. Quark has been slowly messing up the nirvana that was the XPress 3.3 interface for the best part of a decade now. While the obsession with tabbed panels continues, there have been some actual improvements with this release.

Quark’s new rendering system, XDraw, gives XPress a far more polished look than before – it no longer has the look of a reheated Classic app. While XDraw certainly gives your layout and tools a crisp look, it comes at a price. For a Mac to run XPress 7, you’ll need at least a 1GHz G4 – anything less and redraw rates and opening speeds will be glacial. Buying a new Mac may sound like a bad idea, since it’ll have an Intel chip inside it and Quark 7 won’t be a universal binary until a free update in the summer; but in our tests on a 17“ iMac Dual Core with 1.5GB of RAM, bar some slow document opening times, Quark 7 nipped along just fine.

The other big interface change is in the venerable measurements palette. At first glance, this looks just the same as before, but a simple mouse-over will reveal a panel of alternative views for the palette, including text runaround and frame borders. These consist mainly of the contents of the various dialogue boxes, so if you’re used to working at speed with keyboard shortcuts, this improvement will hold nothing for you. For others, though, it will be a helpful way to access and change common settings that neatly avoids the ”palette bloat“ of InDesign.

While the interface clean-ups, which also include a handy ”Guide manager“ for adding, removing and locking guides en masse, are the most obvious changes, there are less obvious but more significant changes. Probably the biggest change – and biggest InDesign killer – are the collaborative functions in Quark. Yes, finally you can work on a layout with other Quark users without having to bring in a bunch of consultants to install the Quark Publishing System. Just select the ”Collaboration Setup“ menu option to begin sharing and off you go. You’ll have to customise exactly which parts of which layouts you want to use using Collaboration Zones and other options, which is far from intuitive or the simple one-click sharing we might have hoped for, but it’s certainly a good feature – one that trumps InDesign’s requirement of the additional purchase of Adobe’s InCopy application.

Notice that we said layouts there. Yes, you can now have multiple views of the same layout open in Quark at the same time. Make a change on page 5 and see what happens on page 7 without having to scroll there and back again. It’s a tiny feature in comparison to some, but still worth its weight in gold.

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