Review: MarkzTools 7
- Article 2 of 19
- MacUser, January 2007
Markzware’s MarkzTools 7 should be a vital add-on to QuarkXPress 7, filling in many of the gaps that Quark should have fixed ages ago or have deliberately left unfilled. It should stave off all manner of disasters and help with a wide range of other problems, such as backward compatibility. However, in practice, it does not perform as advertised.
The list of functions is eclectic. With MarkzTools installed, XPress will verify saved documents so you’ll know if their integrity is suspect. A proprietary temp file will let the XTension recover documents that have become corrupted during a save operation. If a document has already become corrupted, it will salvage what it can: that could be the entire layout if you’re lucky, just the text if you’re not.
As well as these disaster-avoiding tools, MarkzTools has some other functions. You can convert full-colour previews into grey pictures then back again to save space on your hard drive.
In our tests, document verification and the interim save function both perform as expected, although verification slows the save process considerably. The picture preview function works pretty much as you’d expect, although MarkzTools was often reluctant to actually perform the substitution; frequently, it would ignore our requests and we’d have to choose another option instead. The salvage function was crude, never recovering a layout completely, even with undamaged files, but at least getting close to the original. The text recovery function was able to extract text from all the documents we threw at it, although in a French-language document, some non-ASCII characters were substituted with various ‘gremlins’ instead.
But the main attraction is MarkzTools’s backwards conversion function. It’s been a long standing tradition of Quark’s for each version of XPress to only offer compatibility with the previous version’s file format. Anyone with QuarkXPress 7 who wants to deal with QuarkXPress 4.1 or 5 users has to keep old versions of the program installed, saving their document in the previous version’s format, then opening it up in that version of XPress and repeating the process until the target version number is achieved. With XPress 5 only running in Classic or OS 9, Quark users with Intel Macs will have to keep a PowerPC Mac to hand to continue past version six. Theoretically, MarkzTools should make all that a thing of the past, by offering the ability to save in version 4.1’s format.
Unfortunately, at least with the version we tested, the option to save Quark documents as earlier versions just didn’t work. It didn’t matter whether we used a complicated, multi-page layout or a single-page text document; it didn’t matter whether we used the currently open document or one saved on the test drive. Whenever we tried to open one of the supposedly converted documents in Quark 5, 6.5 or 7, they either crashed or reported an error of some kind. Since we were using a virgin installation of Quark with no additional XTensions and no fonts other than OS X’s defaults installed, it’s unlikely to be our setup that’s to blame.
These aren’t the only flaws, either. Despite the £139 price tag, this is very much a ‘no frills’ piece of software. Installation is basic: you unstuff a .sit archive and drag the resulting file to XPress’s XTensions folder. The XTension is PowerPC-only so you’ll need to run Quark in Rosetta or on a PowerPC Mac to get it to load; at the time of writing, Markzware said a Universal version was three to five weeks away. No documentation comes with the XTension, either; for that, you need to go online, although the pages haven’t yet been updated for version seven. Again, Markzware says they’re still working on it. It’s not too big a problem, since most of the functions of the XTension are obvious but some menu options could do with clarification.
But the previous version’s documentation does highlight the fact some functionality has actually been lost in the move to version seven: you can no longer assign default colour labels for documents saved using the XTension, for example.
At the moment, MarkzTools is not something we can recommend. It has too many bugs and has all the hallmarks of something rushed out the door before it was ready. In six months or so, assuming Markzware can fix the problems, it might be worth the money asked for it. For now, we’d suggest avoiding it unless you only need it for its document recovery functions.