QuarkXPress 7 adds transparency for every object -- a feature often requested by designers

by Clive Chan

In the computing world, putting a product out on the market at the right time can make a company, while conversely bad timing can fail even the best product. The Apple Newton was a concept ahead of its time but because the market was not ready, it failed to capitalize on the PDA. Conversely, the delay of OS X support from the veteran QuarkXPress caused many designers to flock to the rookie InDesign. Getting the right product out at the right time is not unlike a game of speed chess, where one must react quickly, yet be able to plan several moves ahead of your opponent.

The new millennium has been tough on Quark. While the company won the bitter page layout wars against Pagemaker in the early 1990s, it had stagnated with releases heading out of the same decade. 2002 was arguably the worst year for Quark, for it failed to make XPress compatible with the highly popular Macintosh OS X and being outsold by the newcomer InDesign. With many of its users continuing to jump ship to Adobe and many new users trained on InDesign, XPress 7 could not come soon enough for Quark. QuarkXPress 7 represents a point for the company. With the beta release of XPress 7, Quark seems to have regained its sense of direction for this release, and QuarkXPress 7’s release in the second quarter of this year is well-timed for both keeping users on board and for keeping upcoming industry movements within its sight.

A new era for DTP
At Macworld this year, Quark announced that XPress 7 is fully ready for the new wave of MacIntel machines whereas Adobe has yet to promote its support, and in fact relies on Rosetta, Apple’s emulator for non-native binaries. XPress 7 is created in what is known as a Universal Binary, meaning it will run equally well across all platforms, be it PowerPC Macs, Intel Macs, or Windows PCs. Clearly, Quark remembers the lessons learned in the early days of Macintosh OS X and finds itself with the upper hand this time around.

As far as Quark has shown to be ready for the next generation rolling off of Steve Jobs’ production lines, it seems that Quark is equally mindful of developments coming out of Redmond, Washington. Windows Vista, which is slated for release late this year, will feature XML as a huge element for its print path and display rendering. The XML Paper Specification, or XPS, is Microsoft’s attempt to take on the professional print and graphic design community. Not only that, Microsoft is also putting XPS as a viable alternative to the PDF format by making documents more malleable. Quark, starting in version 6.5, showed a keen interest in XML. The core text and graphic engines in XPress 7 have been rewritten from scratch to incorporate a specialized XML backbone. In addition to being a format that goes hand in hand with JDF, it also opens up new avenues for Quark if and when Microsoft’s file format gains acceptance.

With PDF already well in hand, Quark has positioned itself to support both of the computing giants. With Microsoft making a grab for the professional design market and Apple targeting the consumer level, maneuvering to adapt to these changing tides is of vital importance not only to Quark, but to other major software vendors including Adobe. A delicate balance between application power, for the enterprise level and usability, for the consumers, must be maintained in order to expand beyond the traditional graphic artist and layout markets.

QuarkXPress 7, however, is not the release to deal with the market shift. With the release of Vista still months away, and acceptance of Microsoft’s XPS even further off in the horizon, Quark needs XPress 7 as a stopgap to stem users from jumping to Adobe. From a usability standpoint, XPress 7 is unlikely to win back the openly hostile users who have already defected to InDesign as their primary layout tool because they are still catching up to requests from their customers. Nor are they likely to gain from a new generation of layout artists, who are increasingly being trained on InDesign due to its inclusion in the Creative Suite. What QuarkXPress 7 has to do is retain those who are contemplating making a switch because certain features are missing from XPress 6.5. This is where OpenType, transparency, and general interface improvements come in. With Quark’s market share still many times above that of InDesign, merely keeping on par with essential features can make it a strong opponent for Adobe.

To designers who place interface design as paramount, QuarkXPress 7 presents a marginally updated interface, which includes tabbed palettes and an overhauled measurement bar. While critics may point to this as a sign of Quark’s antiquity, the interface is often overestimated in the scheme of things. As many computer users know, the use of any application requires a period of adjustment, and Quark is no different. Whereas Adobe’s approach is to maintain a unified interface between its applications, Quark stands alone with its interface. Quark carries that uniqueness as a badge of honour, stating a professional layout program needs a specialized layout and should not be shoehorned into a common design.

Pressroom relief
Of course, the design community constitutes only one quadrant of QuarkXPress users. Print providers also have to deal with any changes made in QuarkXPress and their attitudes toward design applications are less vocal than that of designers. The main feature of interest for print providers is the new Quark Job Jacket. Based on JDF, the Job Jackets represent a way to bundle all of a print provider’s specifications for graphic designers so that compatibility problems are prevented from step one.

“Let’s say your situation changes and your client says you’re going with printer ‘X’ instead of printer ‘Y,’” says Marc Horne, senior product marketing manager of QuarkXPress. “You can then bring in printer X’s job jacket and everyone’s colour settings will be updated across the entire workgroup. This takes out a lot of the fine turning and craftsmanship out of colour management and makes it into something that is read automatically from using JDF as the basis, the glue for this kind of communication.”

All this, of course, is to allow for maximum flexibility with the minimum of hassle. For the printer who is unable to provide job jackets for their presses, it means the loss of clients because they cannot readily make the switch. With new designers entering the workforce with less and less experience with pressroom operations, a predefined Job Jacket, complete with colour profiles and press capabilities can go a long way in reducing conflict between designer and press operator, especially as designers continually try to push the limits of press technology with higher colour gamuts and complex pixel-perfect layouts.

“There was a time when you had very few inputs and only one output to these systems,” says Horne. “It’s moved to the point where you have layout in the middle of the picture, all these inputs from different photographers and designers and so on. And you have potentially all these different outputs: I’m going to go with this press with this geography and that press for that geography. I’ve got to think about digital and all that.”

Involving the pressroom early on in development of a project is a concept well enshrined in JDF. Ideally, JDF data should be started at the beginning of production and passed one step at a time until the finished product rolls off the bindery. It is a complex choreography between different equipment from multiple vendors. Horne says that establishing Quark Job Jackets can ease a firm’s transition into the full-blown JDF model. With more JDF-enabled machinery entering production workflows, adopting the Quark Job Jacket is a big step toward pressroom automation.

Holding the line
Quark and Adobe’s efforts in controlling the professional layout market is but a small piece of a larger revolution in desktop publishing. With heavy hitters like Microsoft coming into the fray and redefining the status quo, adaptation, a traditional weakness of Quark, will be of utmost importance. Adobe, through its acquisition of Macromedia, has shown to have another game plan in mind, further compounding problems by creating a shadowy moving target for Quark.

Looking at QuarkXPress 7 reveals a lot about the company’s future, one that has many dichotomies. While the interface contains improvements all around, you can still see the roots tying down its design. Beneath that hums a rewritten core, but one that does not (yet) run significantly faster or better than the old one. Within its menus there are trendsetting features, but ones that need time to mature and gain acceptance, if it does at all. Should XPress 7 manage to stem the losses, the next version of QuarkXPress could be a formidable force in this ongoing desktop war.