Quark XPress 4

Quark XPress is a paradox. After ten years of success on the Mac it has become virtually synonymous with professional DTP, but after five years on the PC its presence is still minimal. This much-awaited latest release is intended to redress that imbalance. Quark hopes it will not only satisfy the existing Mac users, but also seize the high ground in the Windows market. It's going to be an uphill struggle, though. To understand how the same program has come to be such a success on one platform and such a failure on another, it's necessary to look back.

XPress' major strength has always been its combination of hands-on control and design automation. On the Mac its only real competitor was - and still is - PageMaker. PageMaker's success stemmed from its mimicking of the traditional method of paste-up with its resizable text blocks and images. XPress offered the same sort of flexibility and creativity with its text and picture boxes, but it took things further. With advanced features such as the ability to scale text proportionately when resizing text boxes and to save pages directly as EPS files it took the design-intensive crown.

Just as importantly, XPress also offered automation and efficiency. In particular, its use of automatic text boxes with automatic page insertion allowed it to handle longer files. As these documents are based on master pages it became possible to radically redesign a layout, sloping text boxes or add columns, for example, with all changes happening instantly throughout the entire publication. The use of text style sheets offered the same level of consistency, control and efficiency when formatting. Crucially, the use of text boxes rather than text blocks meant that new files could be flowed into the same layout enabling the same design to be used repeatedly.

XPress offered a mix of functionality somewhere between the simple creativity of PageMaker and the structured efficiency of Ventura - a combination that was irresistible for one group of users in particular. The ability to set up good-looking design-intensive layouts that could be used time and time again was absolutely tailor-made for the production of regular publications - PC Pro included. The match was perfect - too perfect. With the high-end Mac market in the bag there was no incentive for Quark to look elsewhere to broaden its appeal. Worse, because the program was now mission-critical to a mainly conservative user base happy to pay over the odds, there was suddenly a strong argument against continuous development - if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

When Quark did eventually port XPress over to the PC the situation couldn't have been more different. To begin with, competition was intense: PageMaker and Ventura were fighting it out for the professional market, while being pushed from below by the new breed of budget programs such as Serif's PagePlus. There was no ready market for XPress to mop up, especially at the price Quark was asking. Still, its strengths would have ensured it did reasonably well were it not for compatibility problems. The first Windows version simply seemed unreliable, particularly when it came to the all-important area of output. The general advice was to wait until the next major release when all teething problems would be sorted.

It's been a very long wait. Loyal XPress users have been waiting around five years for this latest upgrade, which in computer terms is an eternity. When the last significant release came out, Windows 95 was still a gleam in Bill Gates' eye and PC Pro had yet to hit the newsstands. Not surprisingly, the expectations of the new release are intense: will XPress 4 finally capture the Windows market or is it too little, too late?