New QuarkXPress 7 features revealed

Quark has revealed a raft of exciting new features to be included in version 7 of its long-established DTP package, XPress. With a new, sleek, modern-looking interface, Quark says that XPress 7 will be easier to use, boast quicker on-screen redraw and show much improved text visualisation at low resolution or on rotated text – no more tiny skeletons! Users will also be able to group palettes and assign custom shortcuts to display palette sets.

The driving force behind many of these changes, says the company, is its commitment to improving what it sees as the three core problem areas in creative publishing: collaboration, error-free work-flow and multi-channel publishing.

“Currently only 40 per cent of files are delivered in pdf format, and of those over half require some kind of intervention,” says Jurgen Kurz, Quark’s senior vice president of product development. “This is not an ideal situation and XPress 7 will include a number of pre-flight and collaboration tools that will help to address this specific problem.”

The company hopes to improve collaboration and streamline pre-flight through Job Jacket, one of the software’s new tools. Built on industry-standard JDF, it enables designers to define job parameters that provide centralised control over such elements as style sheets, colour palettes and box styles.

Job Jacket will enable studio managers and other creative managers to specify fonts, colours or rules to be associated with any one project. Then, once a document is finished, a pre-flight tool named Layout Evaluation can be run to highlight any areas where the document does not conform to the parameters set out in the Job Jacket. Errors can then be fixed before going to pdf.

Transparency

Transparency controls will be an important feature of XPress 7. By stripping out old QuickDraw elements and replacing them with XDraw, Quark has been able to introduce a number of features such as smoother shape and text rendering, faster drawing and higher quality text visualisation – including rotated text and transparency, the feature everyone has been waiting for. Designers will be able to set opacity on single objects, grouped objects and blends that can now blend to “none”.

Drop Shadows will be easy to implement in XPress 7 thanks to the introduction of an Apply Drop Shadow dialog box. Designers can now set parameters for drop shadows, including the distance from the parent object, sharpness, skew, opacity, shade, colour and angle. Users will also be able to link drop shadows and change attributes on all the shadows in one document and set text to run-around the drop shadow on a given object.

Glyphs get their own palette in XPress 7, which works in much the same way as the Glyphs palette in InDesign. Simply click on the glyphs to insert them into text on screen. There is also a favourites library where designers can collect their favourite glyphs in one place.

PSD import was supported in 6.5, but in version 7 designers will also see support for transparency in psd files and the mapping of alpha or spot channel layers to each image. Designers will also be able to turn layers on or off within XPress, but won’t be able to view layer sets.

Type tools

Font Fallback is a new tool that is designed to make it easier to work with type that contains characters not supported by the font currently in use. For example, historically when a user imported clipboard text into XPress it would display as small boxes, or odd characters. But with Font Fallback switched on in XPress 7 the software will automatically “fallback” to a font that recognises the characters in the document.

XPress 7 will also expand its access to special characters through Unicode and OpenType support, which signals the appearance of additional keyboard layouts and an increase in user options with regard to glyph and character sets. This includes the introduction of editable fractions, the ability to insert Em and En dashes directly from the glyph palette, and more options for ligatures and superscript features.

Table Rotation is enabled in version 7. Designers can now import information from Excel documents directly into a table in XPress and split the content over two pages (with text flow intact), specify that the headers and footers be duplicated on each page and rotate the table in its entirety without ever touching the data.

Automated colour management

New controls in XPress 7 streamline colour management processes and improve soft proofing on screen. Designers will be able to preview exactly how RGB prints to CMYK on-screen and how CMYK will print in greyscale.