Product Reviews

BeyondPress 3.0 not only allows QuarkXPress users to repurpose their existing documents into HTML, but also lets them reproduce the layout of the printed page in its entirety. What's more, the program adds support for some of the latest HTML 3.2 magic.

Previous incarnations of BeyondPress allowed you to mark up XPress text and picture elements for conversion to HTML, but version 3.0 is more than just a conversion utility; it turns XPress into a sophisticated tool for creating HTML pages from scratch.

Installation is simple - just drag the XTension from the CD into the XPress folder on your hard disk. The program requires at least XPress 3.31 to run, and comes supplied with an updater from 3.3 to 3.31, along with Netscape Communicator 4.01, which is a very sensible addition, since BeyondPress includes support for automatic generation of TrueDoc fonts and Cascading Style Sheets. However, a licence for Communicator is not included in the price.

The CD also contains the manual in HTML form and PDF, although there is no printed version supplied. The online help is linked to the program's palettes by Help buttons that bring up the appropriate page in your browser.

BeyondPress adds three new tabbed palettes to XPress, which tend to obscure the document window if you have a small screen. These palettes control almost everything BeyondPress does, although it's difficult to work out from the icons what the tools do without a printed manual.

The Document Content palette is the most important as it contains all of the necessary buttons to access the settings for each element on the page. It has two 'tabs', for switching between the program's two modes: Authoring mode for creating a HTML document from scratch, and Conversion mode for converting a document which has already been created.

Authoring mode is simple: you create your layout using text boxes, picture boxes and style sheets. Once it's finished, you simply export the page.

Conversion mode gives you more control over text-level HTML codes and conversion, although it doesn't allow you to retain the layout in the way Authoring mode does. Unfortunately, the two modes don't complement one another: settings you make to the text in Conversion mode are ignored by Authoring mode's export.

In either mode, BeyondPress 3.0 offers a great deal of control over automatic conversion to HTML, and you can indicate in the Preferences dialog box which XPress Style Sheets are converted to a particular HTML style, such as or .

Authoring mode considers each XPress page as a separate HTML document, with its own title, background colour, picture and so on, so you can keep your entire Web site in one XPress document.

The Shared Elements palette keeps a reference to all common elements used throughout the site, including

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image files and multimedia elements such as animated GIFs, QuickTime and Java applets. Shared Elements are vital to a BeyondPress 3.0 Web site as no matter how many times they are used, they will only be downloaded by the browser once. BeyondPress exports XPress picture boxes as new images every time they are used, unless they are placed in the Shared Elements palette first.

The Inspector palette is context-sensitive and used for a variety of settings, including those for the conversion of images (GIF or JPEG, interlacing, anti-aliasing, transparency and so on). It also allows you to create an image map which can then be exported as client or server-side code. The Inspector palette is also used to set the parameters for your embedded multimedia elements. BeyondPress 3.0 allows QuickTime and animated GIF files - and, if a runtime compiler is installed, Java applets - to be previewed live directly into the XPress page.

BeyondPress 3.0's most impressive feature is its layout control, which is used to convert XPress pages into their HTML equivalents. HTML is notorious for the lack of control it allows over page layout and typography. But HTML 3.2 has improved this, and BeyondPress 3.0 goes as far as it can to make your Web sites look like the original document, using HTML tables to keep the layout and positioning of your elements.

BeyondPress 3.0 also offers full support for generating Cascading Style Sheets, which means that, for the first time, HTML code can properly define most of the typography used in print. Bitstream's TrueDoc technology is used to generate Portable Font Resource files for the fonts you have used. Netscape 4.0 will automatically download these files and use them to regenerate the fonts in the Browser window.

As with most HTML tools, you can preview your page in a browser at any time, and when you are satisfied with it you can then export it to convert everything to HTML. There's an informative progress box which alerts you to problems, and clicking on a problem in the list displays the relevant object on the page. The re-exporting command only exports the parts which have changed.

BeyondPress 3.0 is far from perfect.

It is a complex tool which does a complex task, and consequently it has an alarming number of options and preferences. Such complexity makes it difficult for a novice to approach the program without being overwhelmed - while it can be used to simply design and export pages, anything other than a simple page of text will cause problems.

The program is not truly WYSIWYG - you can't see the background image or even the background colour on the XPress page, for example, nor can you set the background colours of the tables it produces - so the code it produces still requires some manual tweaking. There is also no support for Netscape plug-ins, and while you can use BeyondPress to embed any multimedia file, there is no way to preview it on the page.

BeyondPress' price tag of £349 seems a bit steep considering it doesn't even come with a licence for the bundled copy of Communicator or a proper printed manual. That said, the program is certainly powerful and offers XPress users the best possible preservation of layout, design and typography. What's more, the program's use of HTML 3.2 Cascading Style Sheets and generation of TrueDoc fonts certainly give it the edge, even over dedicated HTML authoring programs.