Product Reviews

The battle of the desktop publishing giants is back on. Having conquered Adobe PageMaker in the 1990s, Quark ill-advisedly rested on its laurels while Adobe stormed back into power with InDesign. But now Quark has launched QuarkXPress 7.

Its user interface is reassuringly familiar, except that the Measurements palette gains nine tabs showing properties from text formatting to transparency.

At last you can adjust the opacity of any item and add soft drop shadows, InDesign features that Quark users have long coveted. There are still no blending modes (Color Burn, Multiply and so on), although these are preserved within imported Adobe Photoshop files, which QuarkXPress now handles better than InDesign. Picture Effects still don't work with Photoshop's .PSD format, however, and effects applied to type may break when you change fonts. InDesign's effects feel more integrated. OpenType fonts are fully supported, and advanced users will welcome the addition of vertical spacing to the custom kerning tables. InDesign's optical spacing and optical margin alignment remain absent, though.

Two major new features address the modern DTP buzzword, workflow. Composition Zones

For others, the most important innovation will be Job Jackets, a new system for defining, sharing and checking the specifications of print projects. You set up a Job Jacket with basic specifications such as colour swatches and page sizes that will apply to a group of documents, perhaps all your work for a particular brand or department. Within this, you create Job Tickets for specific document types.

The basic principle is fine, but the way it works is complicated, unintuitive and leaves far too much for you to do manually. You can't even preflight a document for basic errors without setting up a Job Ticket to check it against. InDesign's simpler approach, with presets for common tasks, is a lot more practical. We hope to see Quark's system become more usable as ready-made Job Jackets appear. Quark's focus on the back end of publishing is reinforced by other new products such as QuarkXPress Server and the Quark Print Collection. But it has allowed InDesign to stay ahead in the layout functions that people use every day.

The final problem for QuarkXPress is a perennial one: price. At more than £800 (£900 for the multi-language Passport version), it's more expensive than the entire Adobe Creative Suite, including InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. A more reasonable ̀300 upgrade is available from version 3 and higher, and there are generous discounts for students as well as site licence deals. QuarkXPress 7 contains some significant improvements and ideas, but it still needs work to match InDesign's creative usability.