Jürgen Kurz is responsible for the strategic direction of Quark’s suite of media-independent publishing tools, including the recently released QuarkXPress 6.5, which intuitively becomes a barometer for the company’s future. PrintAction spoke with Kurz about the billions of documents already stored in QuarkXPress and the future of formatting as mass communications makes way for personalization, and as companies like Quark, Adobe and Microsoft plan for a new generation of content consumers who are always plugged in.

Jon Robinson: Why did Quark take its installation base for granted by not reacting more quickly in updating QuarkXPress for Mac OS X?

There were a lot of changes that we needed to introduce to optimize the software for OS X, so it wasn’t just like porting it quickly and the job is done. Our customers expect a high degree of quality in this software application, as they would from OS X. I think both of them had to move in conjunction, OS X being ready for print and XPress being ready for OS X.

How much has Adobe InDesign eaten into your customer base?

I think Adobe is doing a good release in terms of its Creative Suite. I don’t think... in fact, I just read an interview with someone from Adobe, who said of those people buying Creative Suite, a lot less than 50 per cent are actually using InDesign. Most people are buying it because they get Acrobat, they get Photoshop, Illustrator and they are still upgrading to XPress.

It will be hard to unglue XPress from production, but how will Quark keep creatives turned-on?

We need to give creative pros, more creative tools in QuarkXPress, which we are starting to do and we are going to really aggressively continue to do in future releases. And vice versa, Adobe is trying really hard to get into our ecosystem, which is QuarkXPress, knowing that they can’t really afford not to own that market.

I think 6.5 really adds a lot in terms of integration, with QuarkVista providing imaging right in QuarkXPress, from a production perspective. QuarkVista is one of the things that customers really requested. [There] is integration with Photoshop so that you can now import native Photoshop files and actually see all of the layers. In fact, this is capability that even InDesign doesn’t provide for its customer base.

We do not want to lose the production aspect of XPress, the ability and security of printing that it provides. So, we always have to watch that balance between making sure that people have real creativity without bounds, as well as output security.

What are you hearing from the printing side?

The biggest demands I hear from the printing industry is “Look guys, try to put the mechanisms into your product that allow me to find rules according to PDF/X standards, etcetera, that will allow me to safely output the job without having to put any more extra work into it.” That is the number-one thing I am hearing from the print perspective.

What does the emergence of the XML standard mean?

There are two or three things around XML. First, it is a method for exchanging content and getting content with meaning. The meaning is basically accomplished by tagging content in a certain way so that you have identifiers of the actual content. It allows you to connect and interchange content between different, and sometimes proprietary, systems. XML is really used as a data-transformation format.

You have a SAP system and a Quark system and a Adobe system and all of these other – more or less proprietary – systems that can now agree to a common language. [They can] exchange information that is relevant and important for another system to process in order to repurpose content.

What does XML mean for printing companies?

In the printing industry, we have rallied around certain standards that are described in XML, the most important one probably being JDF. Whether it is Adobe or Quark or Heidelberg, we can use a dialect and map out document format, so that it meets a workflow and it is much easier for a file to be going through digital workflow, from the content creator all the way to the press.

QXML is a really significant step forward for Quark. We are really opening up our file document format and striving it to XML. There is an open standard technology from the World Wide Web Consortium called DOM, document object model. XML DOM basically describes how the hierarchical structures are to be portrayed.

We are using the DOM concept and standards, but we are also including all of the relevant information about the QuarkXPress aspect of how pages can be created, written or read, how a page has a picture box, a text box, how each text box has content, how content is styled. The relevance for our customers is that this dramatically reduces the time to create documents from databases. Just as important is to get content out of the proprietary QuarkXPress document file format, now into its open standard format, so you can separate meaning from presentation elements and repurpose that content quite rapidly.

What is going on with automatic page composition?

One of the biggest growth markets we see is personalization, which is not just short print runs trying to get to a specific audience, but really making it extremely easy to personalize... for the customer creating their own variable data.

On one side is the database guy, the developer who can use our technologies to create automatic rendering-rules. On the other side, you still have the creative pro who can create a very nice template for them to use. I think getting the power of the template design to a creative pro and then having servers that basically do the automation is definitely a very important thing, because it puts the power with the right people.

What influence will XAML have when Microsoft unleashes Longhorn?

Basically, to me it’s an environment comparable to how Adobe is, in some ways, moving forward with PDF, in terms of making it a rich browser for e-forms, etcetera. [It is a browser] that has interactively, not just static content and flash. What Microsoft is doing, in terms of their rich application, is going in that direction of providing a rich, but still a thin, [browser] from a perspective of how it behaves. On the Microsoft platform, that certainly is something to reckon with, to create dynamic applications that still have very rich interfaces.

Why is Microsoft interested in this?

We don’t know all of what [Longhorn] will entail, but Microsoft wants to go into growth enterprises and I think Adobe has proven this [strategy to be successful]. So has Macromedia with Flash adoption. Providing rich interfaces is a growth market and potentially a multi-billion-dollar growth market. So I would agree, of course, that this is large enough of a market to attract Microsoft’s attention.

How does this influence Quark?

It is clear is that the internet is going into richer applications and we want to give the page-layout artists the ability in QuarkXPress to render multiple rich-media formats and rich-internet applications formats such as Flash.

Will the iPod generation unleash a new movement by demanding how information is to be formatted?

I think there is no doubt about it. This new iPod generation is going to expect content to be available in whatever device, whenever they are interested in content and they are going to be on at all times. That is scary.

Because of personalization, the second important part is that they are still going to want to have information displayed in a nice way with nice colours. I think, increasingly, we are going to see creative pros just kind of providing a blueprint in terms of the branding guidelines. The actual person viewing that information is going to go to that blueprint whether they are going to print, a PDF, Flash. They are going to decide what kind of information channels they subscribe to. This is where XML is so powerful, where the actual publishing engines are married to the transactional engines, the commercial innovations, the data.

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