Product Reviews

Work on Quark's second update to its flagship product has gained such momentum that several developments originally earmarked for a future QuarkXPress 7 have been released early. Originally to be named version 6.2, this mid-term upgrade has been renamed to the more significant-sounding version 6.5. And Quark is giving it away for free.

The upgrade currently comes in several parts: a large updater containing the Quark Vista XTension and many other small enhancements and bug-fixes, and separate downloads for the PSD Import and QuarkXClusive XTensions. These can all be obtained directly from Quark's website or ordered on CD-ROM.

Quark Vista lets you apply adjustments and filter effects to bitmap images on your page instead of switching out to Photoshop. Familiar-looking dialogs for adjusting Levels and Curves, for example, are called up either from the Style menu or from a new Picture Effects palette. Other adjustments provided include Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance, Hue/Saturation, Selective Color and Gamma Correction. You can also apply the following filter effects: Gaussian Blur, Unsharp Mask, Solarize, Diffuse, Emboss, Embossing Effects, Edge Detection, Trace Contour, Add Noise, Find Edges and Despeckle. Threshold and Posterize commands are also included.

The adjustments and effects applied are listed in the Picture Effects palette, where they can be re-ordered by dragging them up or down, and opened for re-editing by double-clicking on their names. All effects can be previewed.

Performance is good, although it slows down for very large images. The image adjustments and effects can be preserved as part of the XPress project file or saved to an external file, either overwriting the original image or saved as a new one. Edited images can be saved individually or all together for an entire layout, and this can be done on demand or automated as part of the Collect For Output routine. As the images are saved, you can change their colour

Two issues distract from this feature working perfectly. First, the slider controls in the dialogs sometimes fail to adjust the settings, which must then be entered manually. Second, colour management and Full Resolution Preview don't provide an accurate enough on-screen impression. That said, the quality of the edited images created by Quark Vista is impeccable.

The PSD Import XTension adds support for Photoshop-native format images to the program. A PSD Import palette then allows you to view Photoshop layers within these images, and optionally show and hide them. Individual layer opacity and transparency blending modes can be adjusted without ever leaving your XPress page. The palette also lets you show and hide channels, including alpha channels, and work with embedded paths, applying them as clipping paths or text runarounds with just one click.

The XTension supports type layers as well as image layers, but can't handle shape or adjustment layers, in which case the image can still be brought onto the page but only as a flattened, uneditable picture. Sadly, Photoshop images added to your layout can't be edited with Quark Vista.

QuarkXClusive is a surprisingly powerful XTension for creating variable print layouts directly in XPress for output to HP Indigo digital presses. Even a simple Excel worksheet can be used as a database for generating complete layouts of personalised text and pictures on the fly. Despite its restriction to HP presses, this kind of solution would normally cost thousands of pounds, and, here, Quark is giving it away free.

There's a lot more to the upgrade than this, of course. The program now supports Citrix distributed application servers as used by many newspaper publishers. Enhanced Jpeg compression options provide a great deal more flexibility when saving layouts as PDF documents. Tables can be grouped, and Print Styles now include Bleed settings. You can also locate and quickly purchase missing fonts using a new Buy Missing Fonts button in the Missing Fonts window.

On its own, the version 6.5 upgrade is highly valuable. Taken together with the new features introduced with XPress 6 - layers, multiple undo, synchronised text, and so on - it's an utterly compelling upgrade for current users of version 4 and 5. It won't make InDesign users switch back, but may be just enough to persuade XPress users to keep the faith.