Quark Xpress

It costs too much, we had to wait too long and it doesn't do enough! This is an easy set of conclusions to jump to if you're mainly interested in print publishing and you've just taken a cursory glance at XPress 5's new feature-set. Yes, you do now get a in-built Table Editor, and it's executed very well indeed. It's easy and obvious to use, and it's so well integrated with the other box/content tools you'd think it had been there all the time.

Apart from that, though, what else do print publishers get? A revised print dialog, improved indexing options and layers support are all very nice, but hardly essential. Apart from some enhanced scripting options and a couple of other modifications, that's about it. Not much when you're expected to pay nigh-on £400 for the upgrade, is it?

It's likely, then, that lots of existing users won't be tempted. Presumably, Quark must be pinning its hopes then on a shift in the way content is managed and distributed, and a new generation of publishers who need to work across multiple media, not just print.

Part of this strategy involves avenue.quark, the Quark XML export XTension now bundled with QuarkXPress instead of being sold separately. With avenue.quark you can tag existing XPress content and then import it into HTML templates, for example, for semi- automated Web publishing with a minimum of effort and reformating.

Web publishing is a big part of v5. With its new Web document type you can now use those familiar XPress layout tools to produce Web pages. Exporting HTML is straightforward, though perhaps lacking options for serious online designers. The aim here, though, is surely to get designers to work on the pages, then hand them off to Website administrators and programmers.

This could actually work very well. Designers don't have to learn new skills, and existing documents can be repurposed for the Web Ð though there's no direct print-to-Web converter as such, and you'll have to manually copy items from one document to another.

Examine them more closely and you'll discover that XPress 5's Web authoring tools are actually quite good. You can create hyperlinks, image maps and rollovers directly on the page, and set the properties of each object individually, choosing compression settings for JPEGs, for example, and converting text frames into graphics where necessary to preserve complex typographic effects.

This is not to say that you won't still need Photoshop for preparing and optimising your Web graphics properly, and a dedicated Web authoring solution like Dreamweaver for managing your site, but Quark has managed to shoehorn XPress neatly into a Web publishing workflow instead of having it sit outside it as part of a parallel but unconnected print publishing process.

XPress 5 is still too expensive, though, particularly when compared to InDesign 2. InDesign doesn't produce Web pages, but it does have XML built in, all the book and indexing tools it lacked in the previous version and an upgraded set of drawing tools that make the ones in XPress look positively antediluvian. XPress is poised to exploit the revolution in multi-channel, multi-media publishing, but at the same time, InDesign is poised to steal all the users disaffected with its pricing and its lack of development on the print side.

QuarkXPress remains as crisp, precise and wieldy as ever - especially when it comes to handling text - and it'll run on the most modest of systems, where InDesign positively gobbles hardware power. But if InDesign makes significant inroads both at corporate and at end user/local bureau level, the dominance of XPress must surely be under threat. Currently it's a program that everybody uses simply because everyone else does, but as to whether it warrants this market position on its own merits is another matter.

Quark XPress holds a warm place in the heart of many journalists and layout artists. It's been around for well over ten years (a lifetime in computing terms) and has built up an army of satisfied users. It's very likely indeed that most newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and posters you see will have been designed using Xpress.

Quark takes on the Web
Earlier versions of QuarkXPress were mystifyingly ignorant of the Web, so we're pleased to see that version 5.0 finally provides ample tools for creating Web pages. However, the implementation is a bit clunky. Unlike other layout programs, such as Adobe PageMaker and Microsoft Publisher, which let you create one document and publish it either as a native file or in HTML, QuarkXPress makes you select the format you intend to publish to (standard, XML, or Web document) before you start a project. This inflexible approach doubles or triples the workload for anyone who wants to use the same file for multiple purposes because it forces you to re-create the same project in different output formats.

However, we're fairly impressed with QuarkXPress's additional Web features, which let you build Web pages in true WYSIWYG style, instead of dealing with HTML. Also, the program lets you put art and text anywhere on a page, then figures out how to translate the page into HTML. Many other programs, such as Word and Dreamweaver, force you to work your way down the page, one element at a time.

The small Web toolbar, which appears as soon as you choose to create a Web page document, has buttons for creating rectangular, oval, or Bezier image maps, check boxes, pop-up menus, and radio buttons. You can easily convert text and image boxes into simple rollover buttons (which change their appearance if a mouse passes over them) and hyperlink them to URLs. Alas, there's neither browser preview nor any built-in transfer commands for uploading to an FTP site.

No multiple undo
Clearly, the software engineers at Quark don't make mistakes; otherwise, this program would offer a multiple undo function. So far, no matter how many edits you make to a project, you can undo only the most recent one. Even Photoshop lets you undo multiple edits. And although we appreciate QuarkXPress's picture/text box layout process, we wish we could just drop text and graphics anywhere on the page as in PageMaker. And finally, it's ridiculous that Quark still doesn't offer a built-in PDF engine, instead requiring you to purchase Adobe Acrobat Distiller in order to export a file to PDF--a serious flaw. We also resent the omission of printed documentation. The online help is feeble and superficial--you won't be able to master the program without purchasing a third-party book. Quark is not exactly cheap shareware, and the lack of an adequate manual is just plain stingy.

And if you need live phone support, be prepared to pay again. Quark's Web site includes downloads and user forums and can be used to contact technical service, but the support policy is the most miserly we've seen. You get one free phone call, and after that, you must pay $35 per incident or $149 for a year's support.

Don't get us wrong, Quark is still the cream of the DTP crop. If you've used a previous version of Quark, you'll absolutely want this upgrade. We wholeheartedly recommend QuarkXPress to anyone who needs an ultimate desktop publishing tool, but we still hope Quark continues to grow and fix its frustrating limitations.

Quark Xpress Resources