Quark XPress 6.5

After the disappointment of the uninspiring QuarkXPress 6.0, Quark promised to buck its ideas up. And so it has. Not content with the quick release of the essential version 6.1 bug-fix, the company has decided to release some of the fruits of its development work for version 7.0 early. The originally mooted 6.2 update has grown into a major mid-term upgrade, now called QuarkXPress 6.5. Cynics should perhaps take a seat because Quark has also decided to make the upgrade available free of charge to every QuarkXPress 6.0 or 6.1 user.

Heralding Quark’s new direction is an XTension named Vista, announced a couple of months ago and finally in users’ hands as part of the 6.5 upgrade. Quark Vista enables you to apply Photoshop-like adjustments and filter effects to images without having to leave QuarkXPress. Using either the program menus or a new floating Picture Effects palette, you can apply Levels, Curves, Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance, Hue/Saturation, Selective Color, Gamma Correction, Threshold and Posterize adjustments; you can also apply Gaussian Blur, Unsharp Mask, Solarize, Diffuse, Emboss, Embossing Effects, Edge Detection, Trace Contour, Add Noise, Find Edges and Despeckle filters.

The Picture Effects palette is intuitive, if a little glitchy, when adjusting sliders. You must also be prepared to work with memory-hogging Full Resolution Previews and have colour management enabled correctly. To Quark’s credit, though, Vista has been very well thought out. Image adjustments are remembered within the project file and not applied to the external image file unless you choose to do so. You can generate a new image and link to it immediately, for example, and apply downsampling and cropping options along the way. These functions can be applied to images on an individual basis using the Save Picture command or collectively through the Collect For Output window, and you still have the option to toggle any of the effects on and off at this late stage.

The second big new feature, although offered as a separate download from QuarkXPress 6.5, is a PSD Import XTension. More than just a native Photoshop image import filter, it provides a new palette in which you can show/hide individual layers within that Photoshop image. You can even adjust the opacity value of each layer and apply Photoshop’s 21 transparency-blending options. Two further tabs in the PSD Import palette enable you to show and hide channels (including alpha channels) and apply embedded clipping paths. With the latter, you can browse the paths visually as thumbnails, apply them to clip the image with one click, and apply them as text runaround paths with a second click.

While the XTension also supports type layers, it can’t work with shape or adjustment layers: you can still place these native Photoshop files on your page but only as flattened images. Somewhat more annoying, however, is the fact that Quark Vista doesn’t even support Photoshop images. Along with the continued lack of pixel transparency in the program, this leaves QuarkXPress 6.5 short of offering a completely built-in alternative to using InDesign and Photoshop together.

QuarkXClusive is also supplied as a separate download. This is a powerful XTension for generating personalised print layouts from variable external data for outputting to HP Indigo digital presses. The interface is spread across many dialog windows and palettes, making it a challenge to set up initially. In its favour, it makes a good job of dealing with text and pictures referenced from the same database. It also includes an imposition function that can be used with any layout, even those without variable data, and leaves the low-end imposer supplied with Adobe InDesign CS PageMaker Edition looking pitiful in comparison.

Because of QuarkXClusive’s limitation to HP presses, we did not have the opportunity to test the feature before writing this review. However, it also supports variable output to PDF, so it may be possible to generate personalised layouts through a non-proprietary PDF route instead.

Many of QuarkXPress 6.5’s other enhancements are bug-fixes, and the ticking of minor issues on user wish lists. For example, you can now group tables – quite a boon because you can now apply Grid settings to all tables in a group at the same time. You can group tables with text and picture boxes, too, for convenient manipulation on the page. Another enhancement sees the addition of Bleed settings within Print Styles. Yet another ensures that the ruler guides that run across a whole master spread or begin on the pasteboard now appear on their associated layout pages.

Quark has added a Buy Missing Fonts button to the Missing Fonts warning dialog – helpful, but not as clever as you might expect. Clicking on the button does nothing more than dump you at the Quark-Linotype Font Store home page, where you must hunt for the font yourself. A more thorough job has been made of Citrix support, which for the first time enables QuarkXPress to run from Citrix MetaFrame XP servers to thin clients in large publishing operations.

But this doesn’t mean that QuarkXPress 6.5 is back on a par with InDesign CS. Too much of its design feature-set has been left to stagnate – typography, for example – for Quark to close the gap in one free-of-charge bridge release. However, the new features will certainly help Quark to move in the right direction.