QuarkXPress 7

Believe the hype: this is unquestionably the most significant upgrade to QuarkXPress since version 3.0 appeared in 1990. For those who don’t remember, version 3.0 confirmed QuarkXPress as the unchallenged leader in professional page layout for the next 12 years. Quark no doubt hopes version 7 will re-affirm its position.

The final edition of QuarkXPress 7 feels snappier and more responsive than any of the betas, both under Mac OS X and Windows. A Universal Binary edition for Intel-based Macs will be made available as a free download later in the summer.

The boxed product is supplied with a 450-page printed user guide and a 50-page ‘what’s new?’ booklet as standard. At last, not a PDF-based manual in sight! Also included is a useful CD of QuarkXPress 7 training videos from Lynda.com.

The key new design feature in this upgrade is transparency support. Unlike Adobe InDesign, which applies transparency to whole objects, QuarkXPress 7 applies it as an attribute similar to colour. This means you can alter the opacity of a box background, its frame and its content independently. You can even apply different opacity values to different characters in a text box if you want. All that’s missing is a Multiply Blending Mode: currently, all you can do is reduce opacity.

Soft drop shadows are simple to apply directly from the newly extended, tabbed Measurements palette. Usefully, you can synchronise all the shadow angles across a spread, and even optionally force text to flow around the shadow, so avoiding any flattening problems.

Best of all, QuarkXPress 7 fully supports greyscale Alpha Channel masks within images. In other words, anti-aliased cut-outs and variable image transparency is now possible – no more harsh clipping paths with ugly halos. If you import pictures in Photoshop PSD format, you can browse and selectively manipulate all the channels, layers and paths as visual thumbnails within the PSD Import palette.

Designers will also appreciate QuarkXPress 7’s new graphics engine, XDraw, which produces more detailed and accurate onscreen representations of text and pictures than in previous versions.

Jaw-dropping innovation
Support for OpenType fonts alongside PostScript and TrueType fonts radically enhances the program’s typography controls. When using OpenType, you can activate a variety of special glyph options, such as discretionary ligatures, fractions, ordinals, swashes and alternative numeral types. There is also a new Glyphs palette, which helps you browse and pick specific characters in any font, including the vast Unicode sets within OpenType. This Glyphs palette is much easier to use than the equivalent in Adobe InDesign.

For jaw-dropping innovation, however, take a look at Composition Zones. This feature has the potential to revolutionise the work of anyone managing a design team or editorial production desk. Put simply, it enables you to break off areas on a spread and share them with other QuarkXPress 7 users, either locally or remotely. This leaves you to continue working on the same layout while other people tackle the Composition Zones you sent them.

As they make their changes, their assigned zones on your layout are updated instantly without interfering or overwriting your own work. Just imagine, you could be editing the main story in a layout while a graphic artist works on the images and a sub-editor fills an empty side panel with new text, all simultaneously.

No less revolutionary is the Job Jackets feature, which could dramatically improve your interaction with printers and colour houses. Job Jackets expands the concept of pre-flighting and integrates it throughout the creative design process, not just at final output. The only problem with Job Jackets is that they are very complicated to set up, although using them is straightforward.

Quark has developed the Synchronised Text feature from QuarkXPress 6.x to support the sharing of all manner of content, including both text and pictures. You can even share box attributes independently of content, enabling you – for example – to standardise the appearance of picture box frames throughout a project, and optionally update them all instantly if the design subsequently changes.

Production staff also have reason to welcome QuarkXPress 7. You can set up and re-use multiple PDF export settings – or indeed those for EPS and PS export – in much the same way as you can for Print settings. The Print and PDF Export dialog windows have been redesigned and re-organised to make better use of screen space. We were surprised at how comprehensive the PDF Export options were; you can even output the pages in a layout to individual PDFs in one pass.

Also important is the powerful new colour management system, which is now permanently enabled. What makes it so useful is that you can prepare multiple Output Setups that preview your layouts on screen according to different press profiles. For example, you could soft-proof your layout as a five-colour job on coated paper, then immediately view it as a four-colour job on newsprint simply by picking a different Output Setup from the menus. You can even run side-by-side comparisons using the Split Window feature.

There are lots of other valuable upgrade features, including the ability to break long tables over two pages complete with running headers and footers, and the rehauled palette interface. The tabbed Measurements palette is brilliant; you’ll hardly ever need to open a dialog window again.

This upgrade brings QuarkXPress back on par with Adobe InDesign in most areas and, indeed, pushes well ahead of it in others. Looking for a powerful, designer-friendly page layout package that enables advanced collaborative workflows, not to mention on-page image editing and web design, straight out of the box? Well, QuarkXPress 7 has now arrived.