Quark XPress 4

XPress' long document management has certainly been enhanced, but it still lags behind programs like Ventura and FrameMaker. The use of style sheets could be expanded to handle properties like background colour, bulleting and numbering. Automatic layout could also be dramatically improved with the ability to specify side-heads and straddle-heads, while being able to include cross-references is essential for many longer documents. In fact, text handling could be improved all round with a dedicated story editor that allowed text to be dealt with separately from the layout.

The biggest disappointment of all, though, is the lack of any cell-based table editing. For much technical work this is essential, and Quark's omission puts XPress out of the running for many design jobs.

Another weak area is XPress' electronic outputting options - or rather, the complete lack of them. The latest XPress still doesn't support output directly to Adobe Acrobat. Many publishers, which would like to be able to offer publications not just on paper but as files for download from the Web or for browsing on CD, can't do so because of the lack of integrated support. With the help of Adobe Distiller it's possible to create basic PDFs, but impossible to automatically set up tables of contents, bookmarks and so on. With the ongoing proliferation of PDFs and their likely use in PostScript-based print production environments, this is a format any professional publishing program must cater for.

Where to next?

The lack of support for arch rival Adobe's format is more than just an oversight. Quark has spent much of the last few years developing and promoting its own electronic publishing format, Immedia. However, its inferior specification, proprietary nature and the fact that files can only be created with the Mac version of XPress have limited its take-up to niche markets. Incredibly, though, in its attempt to push Immedia, Quark has even chosen to ignore the Web. There are simply no options for outputting pages to HTML from XPress. When budget programs like Publisher can automatically recreate pages as HTML tables, and high-end programs like FrameMaker can repurpose publications as ready-linked sites, this really is an alarming limitation. The phrase 'head in the sand' springs to mind.

Having said this, XPress' core market remains paper-based print. This has always been a huge strength, with unmatched features such as trapping control that can be set at a publication, colour or object level. High-end support has been boosted in the new release with ICC-based colour management from Kodak and the ability to produce hi-fi colour based on the six-plate Hexachrome system. Glossy magazine publishers have been crying out for this for some time now, and with XPress in the fold the system should become more widespread. Lower down the scale, for those producing spot colour work, the ability to define multi-ink colours based on percentages of existing colours should help make the most of tighter budgets.

Even for paper output, though, XPress has some surprising limitations and weaknesses. While the new tabbed print dialog consolidates a number of features including print styles, for instance, the so-called print preview only shows the basic orientation of the page. With a program like CorelDraw it's possible to preview each colour-separated plate and to interactively change layouts and impositions. Potentially more serious is the question of PostScript support. There were also some problems in the previous PC release of XPress, which led to some outputting bureaux not accepting its files. The latest version now has a PostScript error handler to help isolate problems, which is a step forward, but hardly reassuring. More worryingly, there seems to be no mention of support for the latest PostScript 3, despite the fact that this offers a number of advantages for high-end processing.