Quark XPress 4

It's too soon to tell if the PC-based XPress' outputting is now reliable, but it's true that the program as a whole seems more stable. I was slightly worried when the installation routine fell over and failed to create a program group, but since then XPress has felt very solid. Even complicated procedures such as repositioning multiple images with complex runarounds happen instantaneously and seem well within the program's comfort zone. Trying to do the same in CorelDraw would always call for a quick save to file first, just to be on the safe side. In a way, then, XPress 4 does now finally seem comfortable under Windows.

However, there's a lot more to true PC compatibility than a lack of bugs and GPFs. To begin with there's the level of usability that Win95 users have come to expect. Many of XPress' failings, such as lack of a toolbar or property bar, are common to most Mac-derived programs including PageMaker, but there's really no excuse for the inability to preview fonts in a high-end DTP program. Just as restricting is the measly one level of undo and the rudimentary on-line help. These are serious limitations, but in the end it's the smaller niggles like the Get Picture and Get Text commands which both default to the same directory, and that there's no list of recently opened files that gradually mount up and tell against XPress. Sorting these out would have taken Quark no time at all, but would have saved its users plenty.

In most cases you'll be able to live with such failings, but there are other problems with Quark's high-handed approach to PC compatibility. In terms of graphic support, for example, XPress can only import a total of ten vector and bitmap formats. Admittedly these include the most important - TIFF, EPS, WMF, GIF and JPEG - but there's no support for the Windows-enhanced metafile format or for the increasingly popular PNG. Text formats are even more hard done by. Only tagged ASCII, RTF, WordPerfect and Word files can be imported. Worse, the Word filter hasn't even been optimised for the latest release, so it was unable to read Word 97 files. In the end I was forced into saving files in Word 2 format which, in addition to being very inconvenient, meant losing out on features like character-based style sheets.

Going your own way is all very well, but this goes too far. Quark seems to have transferred its prejudice from Microsoft's OS to its word processor - which would be fine if they weren't the operating system and word processor used by most people in businesses. Come to think of it, that's probably why XPress doesn't offer Web support - it's too popular! It's almost funny. XPress is an excellent program and this is a major release that reinforces its pre-eminence for design-intensive work, while boosting its long document capabilities. By all rights it should be the dominant package on the PC as it is on the Mac. But it isn't, and if things continue in the same way, it won't be.

The problem isn't so much the program itself - core power and reliability are now in place - it's with the company. It's Quark that has to prove its PC credentials by offering greater emphasis on usability, more leading-edge power, faster development, more compatibility with existing standards and greater value for money. XPress' splendid isolation might have served Quark well in the past, but now it would be wise to look around and start building some bridges.

Author: Tom Arah