QuarkXPress 8 review

It's all in the text

Ultimately QuarkXPress stands or falls by its handling of text. And here there are a number of significant advances starting with improved support for Unicode and the ability to handle more than 30 languages. When dealing with foreign languages, or with the rich alternative glyphs of modern OpenType fonts, it can be difficult to find exactly the character you are looking for, but the reworked Glyph palette makes this much easier.

The most regularly useful text handling advance is the redesign of font dropdowns which now show the name of each typeface displayed in its own font - a long overdue but very welcome improvement.

In terms of typography and text aesthetics, the major addition is the support for hanging punctuation and punctuation margin alignment. At first sight this looks like it's just catching up with InDesign, but QuarkXPress takes things further, allowing you build your own settings to precisely define the hang of any character, including drop caps. You can also apply settings not just to the story as a whole but on a paragraph or style basis - exactly what you need to produce callouts that really stand out.

QuarkXPress 8 also enhances the handling of baseline grids. These are crucial for ensuring that lines of text line up across columns, so providing an underlying grid for the page. Previously, QuarkXPress offered a single document-wide grid but now you can set up multiple grid settings that can be quickly and consistently applied to different master pages or text boxes. You can also define baselines, centrelines and toplines either manually or by reading them from the font and you can link the grid to a paragraph style so that if line spacing is changed the grid changes too.

Flash harry

The improved handling of hanging punctuation and baseline grids are certainly handy but let's face it: they aren't going to set the world on fire. To live up to its 'revolutionary' billing, QuarkXPress 8 needs to provide some totally new and significant design power. This it does by providing an entirely new layout type - Interactive. In short, Quark plans to revolutionize publishing again by turning QuarkXPress into a Flash authoring package.

Our first reaction to the news wasn't just sceptical, it was cynical. To begin with, the power isn't exactly new. In fact Quark has been offering it for some years now through its Interactive Designer XTension. This is still available for £135 exc VAT and, more to the point XTension has been free to all purchasers of QuarkXPress 7 since last September. Throughout that time the publishing world has remained resolutely unrevolutionised.

The doubts run deeper. Quark lost its publishing dominance precisely because it failed to concentrate its energies on print and started experimenting with onscreen publishing. This began with the ill-fated QuarkImmedia project and reached its nadir with QuarkXPress 5 which introduced its own new layout type: Web.

Thankfully QuarkXPress 8's Flash authoring proves very different to its embarrassing HTML handling. The difference essentially comes down to the platform. HTML/CSS was simply never intended to be a design rich format. In contrast, the primarily vector-based multimedia Flash SWF format can handle whatever design QuarkXPress can throw at it. Simply click on the new SWF Preview command icon and your fully scalable, web-efficient, wysiwyg Flash layout speedily appears onscreen.

Flash as a platform offers another major advantage - support for interactivity. In QuarkXPress 8 this is handled through the new Interactive Palette. Simply select an object, give it a name and you can then add event-driven actions. The range on offer includes actions for page navigation, loading web pages, handling text and managing menus and pop-ups. Most important of all, QuarkXPress 8 lets you load and play audio and video files and add path-based animations so that static print publications can be brought to life.