Product Reviews

Markzware's MarkzTools 7 should be a vital add-on to QuarkXPress 7, filling in as it does many of the gaps that Quark should have plugged ages ago. It should stave off all manner of disasters and help with a wide range of other problems, such as backwards compatibility. However, in practice, it doesn't perform as advertised.

The list of functions is eclectic. With MarkzTools installed, XPress will verify saved documents so you'll know if their integrity is suspect, and a proprietary temp file should let the XTension recover documents that have become corrupted during a save operation. If a document has already become corrupted, it claims to salvage what it can: that could be the entire layout if you're lucky, or just the text if you're not.

As well as these disaster-avoiding tools, MarkzTools has some other useful functions. For example, you can convert full-colour previews into grey pictures then back again to save space on your hard drive.

In our tests, document verification and the interim save function both performed as expected, although verification slowed the save process considerably. The picture preview function worked pretty much as we expected, although MarkzTools was often reluctant to actually perform the substitution: it would often ignore our requests and we'd have to choose another option instead.

The salvage function was crude, never recovering a layout completely, even with undamaged files. It did, however, at least get close to the original. The text recovery function was able to extract text from all of the documents we threw at it, although in a French-language document, some non-ASCII characters were substituted with various 'gremlins' instead.

However, the main attraction is MarkzTools's backwards conversion function. It's been a long-standing tradition of Quark's for each version of XPress to only offer compatibility with the previous version's file format. Anyone with XPress 7 who wants to deal with XPress 4.1

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or 5 users has to keep old versions of the program installed, saving their document in the previous version's format, and then opening it up in that version of XPress and repeating the process until the target version number is achieved. With XPress 5 only running in Classic or Mac OS 9, XPress users with Intel Macs will have to keep a PowerPC Mac to hand to continue past version 6. Theoretically, MarkzTools should make all that a thing of the past by offering the ability to save in version 4.1's format.

Unfortunately, at least with the version we tested, the option to save XPress documents as earlier versions just didn't work. It didn't matter whether we used a complicated, multi-page layout or a single-page text document; it didn't matter whether we used the currently open document or one saved on the test drive. Whenever we tried to open one of the supposedly converted documents in XPress 5, 6.5 or 7, they either crashed or reported an error of some kind. Since we were using a virgin installation of XPress with no additional XTensions and no fonts other than OS X's defaults installed, our setup was probably not the cause of these problems.

These aren't the only flaws, either. Despite the £139 price tag, this is very much a no-frills piece of software. Installation is basic: you unstuff a .sit archive and drag the resulting file to XPress' XTensions folder. The XTension will only run on PowerPC-based Macs, you'll need to run XPress in Rosetta or on a PowerPC-based Mac to get it to load; at the time of writing, Markzware claims a Universal Binary version was three to five weeks away. The XTension doesn't come with any documentation, either - for that, you need to go online, although the pages haven't yet been updated for version 7. Again, Markzware says it's still working on it. Having said that, though, it's not too big a problem, since most of the functions of the XTension are obvious, although some menu options could do with clarification.

The previous version's documentation does highlight the fact that some functionality has actually been lost in the move to version 7: you can no longer assign default colour labels for documents saved using the XTension, for example.

At the moment, MarkzTools isn't something we can recommend. It has too many bugs and bears all the hallmarks of something rushed out the door before it was ready. In six months or so, assuming Markzware can fix the problems, it might be worth the money asked for it. For now, we'd suggest avoiding it unless you only need it for its document recovery functions.