Product Reviews

Ten years ago, QuarkXPress was the undisputed king of professional publishing. However, rather than focusing on core print capabilities, Quark wasted effort grafting on embarrassingly underpowered web-design tools and allowed Adobe InDesign to steal the publishing crown. To recover anything like its former glory, Quark needs to do something special.

That's exactly what the company claims to have done with its overhaul of the QuarkXPress interface. At first sight, this seems to boil down to little more than a new colour scheme and some command icons at the bottom of document windows for splitting your screen, navigating between pages and so on. These might be handy, but are hardly radical. Turn to the toolbox, though, and you're in for a surprise: the former range of tools has been cut down to just eight core options and a similar number of variations.

It's not just the toolbox that's been streamlined, but also the way you work in QuarkXPress 8. Rather than adding separate text and picture boxes, for example, you now just add a single container type and QuarkXPress 8 intelligently switches to the right Item tool when you want to work with content. You can even drag and drop files directly into layouts or load up multiple files at a time. Best of all is the new Picture Content Tool, which lets you position, rotate and scale images interactively while viewing the areas that will be cropped out as a semi-transparent preview.

When it comes to design power, the Pen tool has been revamped to create Bezier paths in exactly the same way as market leader Adobe Illustrator. When you are converting text to vectors for graphical treatment, you can now convert multiple lines, whole stories and even entire spreads. For those occasions when QuarkXPress's internal drawing power isn't enough, you can now import Illustrator's AI files directly.

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The most important design enhancements are text-based. There's improved support for Unicode, and for over 30 languages straight out of the box. There's also enhanced typography, with new handling of baseline grids, hanging punctuation and margin alignment. Most welcome is the new typeface preview in all font drop-down menus; however, Quark rightly isn't making too much of this development as it's long overdue.

Interactive imagination

So far, so good - but there's nothing here to set designers' blood pumping. However, QuarkXPress 8 has one standout addition. Alongside the existing Print and Web options, you can now create Interactive layouts and projects. When you do, a new Interactive palette becomes available with which you can add onscreen navigation, basic animations, audio and video. Click on the new SWF Preview command icon and your static design springs to life as an interactive onscreen publication that can be delivered quickly and efficiently over the web to anyone with Flash Player.

It could be argued that, with its new Flash-based design capabilities, Quark is making another mistake in focusing on screen-based publishing at the expense of paper. That would be unfair, though, as Flash provides a far richer design platform than HTML/CSS, and is a more natural web partner for QuarkXPress to work with. In many ways, QuarkXPress 8's new interactive publishing makes sense of the development effort that Quark has put into features such as multiple layouts per project, composition zones and synchronised text. However, while some users will love QuarkXPress 8's new ability to rework print publications quickly for onscreen viewing, others will probably never touch it.

If Quark had managed to deliver similar streamlined efficiency and cross-media output five years ago, it's likely that QuarkXPress would still be today's dominant publishing force. As it is, while QuarkXPress 8 manages to show InDesign a thing or two in terms of general productivity and repurposing flexibility, it still can't compete with the breadth and depth of power of Adobe's Creative Suite.

For non-professional users, the price of both these high-end packages means they're not serious options. Home users should look to Serif PagePlus X3 (reviewed in What's New, Shopper 247), which is just £80. If you want to try out QuarkXPress 8, though, our cover disc contains a fully working 60-day trial.