Product Reviews

QuarkXPress is one of the few truly revolutionary applications. Twenty years ago Quark took the simple hands-on approach to DTP pioneered by PageMaker, grafted on some high-end control, and reinvented the publishing industry.

For a decade QuarkXPress ruled the world of commercial print design but then threw it away and allowed Adobe InDesign to seize its publishing crown. Winning it back will demand something special - which is exactly what Quark is promising for this new release. The slogan for QuarkXPress 8 is: 'Revolutionizing Publishing. Again.'

The claimed revolution starts with a major redesign of the QuarkXPress interface. This has to be something of a balancing act as the last thing that Quark wants to do is to throw away familiarity and productivity. However there's still plenty of improvement beyond the new blue colour scheme. Particularly welcome are the new command icons at the bottom of the main document window which let you navigate between pages, toggle between master and page view, split the screen and quickly export your layout.

Quark has been braver than we expected, however, and completely restructuring the main toolbox. There are just eight tools on display here with a similar number of variations available as flyouts. Critically, the previously separate text and picture box tools have merged: you can now add your container and load in either text or images. Even better, you can simply import files directly and QuarkXPress 8 will automatically create the necessary boxes. You can even drag and drop files directly into your layout; and out again for editing in Photoshop for example.

More intelligence

QuarkXPress 8 is also more intelligent about how box content is handled. To begin with, double-clicking with the Item tool automatically selects the right tool for the box type (QuarkXPress 8 also now offers single key tool shortcuts to make life even simpler). Here the new Picture Content tool is a revelation. In previous versions sizing, cropping, rotating and offsetting photos was an awkward process involving multiple tools or numeric dialog box entry. Here it's handled smoothly and interactively with keyboard modifiers providing the necessary control.

The process isn't just more efficient, the creative freedom it enables will lead to more exciting use of images and better designs. The same is true of the new ability to quickly rotate boxes simply by dragging on a corner which will encourage designers to break out from predictable grid-like layouts.

Another tool that has been seriously reworked is QuarkXPress 8's Pen tool. By default this now creates Bézier paths as a sequence of control points just as the Pen tool does in Adobe Illustrator.

Other flyout tools let you add, delete and convert control points, but it seems odd at first that there are no shape tools. In fact this apparent shortcoming proves a strength as you can quickly convert any text glyph to an editable box. And now you can convert multiple lines, entire stories and even entire spreads while fully maintaining the appearance of the text during conversion.

The hands-on drawing power that QuarkXPress 8 offers is impressive and adds another dimension to design work but it can't compete with the dedicated vector handling of market-leading Adobe Illustrator. Quark's solution is to add direct support for Illustrator's native AI files. It's not up there with the Illustrator support that InDesign offers, nor with QuarkXPress' own support for Photoshop PSD files, but it certainly helps close the gap.

It's all in the text

Ultimately QuarkXPress stands or falls by its handling of text. And here there are a number of significant advances starting with improved support for Unicode and the ability to handle more than 30 languages. When dealing with foreign languages, or with the rich alternative glyphs of modern OpenType fonts, it can be difficult to find exactly the character you are looking for, but the reworked Glyph palette makes this much easier.

The most regularly useful text handling advance is the redesign of font dropdowns which now show the name of each typeface displayed in its own font - a long overdue but very welcome improvement.

In terms of typography and text aesthetics, the major addition is the support for hanging punctuation and punctuation margin alignment. At first sight this looks like it's just catching up with InDesign, but QuarkXPress takes things further, allowing you build your own settings

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to precisely define the hang of any character, including drop caps. You can also apply settings not just to the story as a whole but on a paragraph or style basis - exactly what you need to produce callouts that really stand out.

QuarkXPress 8 also enhances the handling of baseline grids. These are crucial for ensuring that lines of text line up across columns, so providing an underlying grid for the page. Previously, QuarkXPress offered a single document-wide grid but now you can set up multiple grid settings that can be quickly and consistently applied to different master pages or text boxes. You can also define baselines, centrelines and toplines either manually or by reading them from the font and you can link the grid to a paragraph style so that if line spacing is changed the grid changes too.

Flash harry

The improved handling of hanging punctuation and baseline grids are certainly handy but let's face it: they aren't going to set the world on fire. To live up to its 'revolutionary' billing, QuarkXPress 8 needs to provide some totally new and significant design power. This it does by providing an entirely new layout type - Interactive. In short, Quark plans to revolutionize publishing again by turning QuarkXPress into a Flash authoring package.

Our first reaction to the news wasn't just sceptical, it was cynical. To begin with, the power isn't exactly new. In fact Quark has been offering it for some years now through its Interactive Designer XTension. This is still available for £135 exc VAT and, more to the point XTension has been free to all purchasers of QuarkXPress 7 since last September. Throughout that time the publishing world has remained resolutely unrevolutionised.

The doubts run deeper. Quark lost its publishing dominance precisely because it failed to concentrate its energies on print and started experimenting with onscreen publishing. This began with the ill-fated QuarkImmedia project and reached its nadir with QuarkXPress 5 which introduced its own new layout type: Web.

Thankfully QuarkXPress 8's Flash authoring proves very different to its embarrassing HTML handling. The difference essentially comes down to the platform. HTML/CSS was simply never intended to be a design rich format. In contrast, the primarily vector-based multimedia Flash SWF format can handle whatever design QuarkXPress can throw at it. Simply click on the new SWF Preview command icon and your fully scalable, web-efficient, wysiwyg Flash layout speedily appears onscreen.

Flash as a platform offers another major advantage - support for interactivity. In QuarkXPress 8 this is handled through the new Interactive Palette. Simply select an object, give it a name and you can then add event-driven actions. The range on offer includes actions for page navigation, loading web pages, handling text and managing menus and pop-ups. Most important of all, QuarkXPress 8 lets you load and play audio and video files and add path-based animations so that static print publications can be brought to life.

It's not just the Interactive Palette that makes Flash-based repurposing so straightforward. Over the years Quark has added a whole host of power for working with multiple layout variations such as the ability to share updatable elements and to mark off composition zones; this allows different users to simultaneously work on the same project. The capabilities seemed serious overkill when the HTML results were so weak, but with Flash output they suddenly all come into their own. You can even use the composition zone feature to provide an HTML-based surround for your Flash extravaganza.

Put it all together and QuarkXPress 8 provides a very useful design-rich alternative to Adobe Flash CS3 Professional for SWF authoring. More importantly, QuarkXPress 8 users now have an excellent alternative screen delivery route for their existing print publications.

But the best is yet to come. With its recent launch of Acrobat 9, Adobe is merging the previously separate worlds of SWF and PDF. QuarkXPress 8's Flash authoring capabilities mean that it should be especially well placed to take advantage of this new offline delivery route for interactive publications. It looks like the time has finally come for Quark's long standing vision of integrated print and electronic publishing.

Conclusion

But let's not get carried away. QuarkXPress 8 isn't likely to persuade those users who deserted to InDesign to return - especially as the next InDesign is almost certain to add its own Flash-based power. It's important to remember that only certain projects are suited to such onscreen repurposing - QuarkXPress' print capabilities will dominate for some time to come. And, important to note, pushing the new features in the pre-release press code led to a number of crashes which would be unacceptable in a high-end production environment.

Assuming these bugs are fixed, and Flash/PDF support added, QuarkXpress 8.x will certainly prove a force to be reckoned with. Adobe InDesign remains more powerful and better value, especially as part of Adobe's Creative Suite. However InDesign increasingly feels like a lumbering dinosaur compared to the newly streamlined and adaptable QuarkXPress.