Quark XPress 4 review

As well as flowing within boxes, XPress also now allows text to be flowed along paths. Curves are created with either the orthogonal, BÚzier or FreeHand text-path tools and, once selected with the Content tool, text is added as soon as you begin typing. It's possible to flip the text and to choose between four options for orientating letters with regard to the line. You can even choose whether text alignment should be based on the top, middle or centre of the line and whether it should be based on the text ascender, descender or baseline, although for some reason it's impossible to set an offset.

XPress doesn't just offer fine control over the text, the formatting of the path can also be controlled precisely. There are now 11 default dash and stripe styles, and you can create your own customised versions. Each line style is fully scalable so that it can be used successfully at any size. Each line style can be used for framing boxes, for stroking BÚzier curves and also for adding rules to text and text styles. It's even now possible to control the gap colour - the colour that appears between lines and dashes - although not when applying text rules.

With such design power allied to such control, XPress leaves DTP rivals like PageMaker far behind. However, there are some disappointments and limitations. There's no easy way to add regularly shaped polygonal boxes, for example, let alone more complex shapes like spirals. The automatic image masking is limited to dropping out white and there are no bitmap-based effects. Object handling is also fairly basic - with this amount of drawing power it would make much more sense if it was XPress that offered layers, rather than PageMaker. For advanced features like these or many others, such as lens effects, texture fills, enveloping and so on, a dedicated drawing package is still the best solution. However, for a huge range of text-heavy, but design-intensive, projects the mix of power that XPress offers is ideal.

Wrestling with long documents

As well as boosting its graphic design power, Quark has also turned its attention to the other end of the publishing spectrum - long document management. In many ways, with its use of master pages, automatic text boxes and style sheets, XPress should be well suited for the creation of books and manuals, but this has always been a surprisingly weak area. Now, though, its core capabilities have been extended. The introduction of character style sheets, for example, helps boost formatting efficiency and consistency within paragraphs, while the new maximum permissible numbers of styles, colours, tabs and paragraphs effectively remove any size limit on single publications.

Much more important, though, is the new ability to manage multiple chapters. This is achieved through the Book palette, which allows chapters to be opened and added from anywhere across a network. Chapters can be reorganised and printed, and it's possible to synchronise page numbering, colours, styles and so on throughout the publication. Another major introduction is the ability to generate tables of contents and tables of figures with the Lists palette. This searches documents looking for specified paragraph-based style sheets and adding them to a list. This list can then be automatically alphabetised, formatted and added to the document, then easily updated. A nice touch is that the list is shown in the palette and can be used for navigation - very handy when dealing with long documents. Indexing is now handled in a similar way, with a specialist XTension included on the CD.