Review: QuarkXPress 7.0
- Article 22 of 89
- MacFormat, June 2006
Quark’s back and it’s in fighting spirit. But can it deliver a knockout to InDesign?
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The rest of Quark’s new features pretty much carry on in the same vein: improved import of Photoshop documents; a new icon in the measurements palette for adding OpenType-specific features such as standard and discretionary ligatures, proper small caps and swashes; layer colouring to identify which elements are on which layer – all the small but helpful improvements you’d expect from a program that’s been around since OS 6.
All this gain but there has been some pain. As per usual, Quark has upgraded the file format and made it impossible to save in anything except it and the previous file format, version 6. For many companies, that means it’s going to be an all-or-nothing upgrade to XPress 7.
But is it worth the price tag, both for new users and those upgrading? And is InDesign better? Quark 7 costs £880, which is a large amount of money indeed, particularly when you consider that InDesign costs £492 and you can get the entire Adobe Creative Suite for a little over £1,000. Even the upgrade price is roughly £300 or so. That’s plenty of money to be spending, potentially for few new features. So is QuarkXPress 7 twice as good as InDesign? The short answer is no. InDesign is still superior in a number of areas, particularly if you’re using XPress to edit text and not just lay out documents. It’s actually in day-to-day use that InDesign has the edge, even if it’s sometimes hard to find out which palette the edge is hiding in, while XPress undoubtedly holds the high-end. The fact you have to pay more for XPress’s Passport Edition if you’re going to use multiple languages in your documents – something you get for free in InDesign – is still irritating. And while XPress’s interface is still a whole load better than InDesign’s, it’s not so much better that InDesign is unusable in comparison.
If Quark could bite the bullet and sell XPress at a competitive price, the question of InDesign versus XPress would simply be one of taste. But at the current pricing levels, unless you’re so entrenched in the Quark way of doing things, take a serious look at InDesign. Although XPress’s new features are in many ways excellent and in some ways superior, for most people, they’re just not worth £400 more than InDesign.
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