*** From the Archives ***

This article is from July 25, 2005, and is no longer current.

First Look at an Impressive QuarkXPress 7.0

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at the Denver International Airport waiting for the Super Shuttle when I suddenly saw myself as a dinosaur. How many times had I made this trip to Quark over the years? How many enthusiastic new faces had I shaken hands with while pledging to keep an open mind? And how many times had I returned even more jaded than before, thinking that it was only a matter of time before Quark got its comeuppance?
Yet I was looking forward to this particular visit. The crew at Quark has been much more consistent and impressive in recent years, and I’d been hearing good things about XPress 7.0. Plus, I know that no matter what the official company line is, Quark’s financials must be hurting from the release of InDesign and the apparent lack of enthusiasm among customers for recent upgrades. There’s nothing like a financial hit to foster innovation, and though Quark is nowhere near a make-or-break point, ice-cold water has clearly been thrown in its face. The company seems more awake and alert than ever. You may feel it’s too late, and for many of you it might be. But it’s naïve to suggest that what Quark does with XPress is not important.
Focusing on the detailed feature battle between QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign is sadly misdirected — that’s a little like arguing which company makes better film, Kodak or Fuji. Opportunity for publishers and designers isn’t going to come from expanded transparency settings or hanging punctuation. Page design and production is, in most cases, still a painfully manual process that sits outside of mainstream data flow. That was fine when publishing was a one-way, marginalized process, but now it just creates bottlenecks and aggravates the IT department. With XPress 7.0, Quark is making a major commitment to move page production out of its proprietary and dead-end world. That may not be something designers can sink their teeth into, but it’s good news to production and IT managers at large companies around the world.
Oh, and by the way, Quark is also adding transparency settings, better typography, and enough bells and whistles to please all but the most aggressive feature mongers. More on that on page 2 and 3.
Starting with a Clean Slate
There’s a lot to say about XPress 7.0, and for most users it’s worth waiting for, if only to evaluate. Quark understands that this is a critical upgrade and knows that our collective patience is running out. Consequently, this isn’t a case of tacking on a few new features to XPress. It’s about a wholesale makeover that, if it works, preserves the things that made XPress such a success, while still moving the needle toward collaborative, automated, and fully integrated publishing processes.
But before I reveal Quark’s strategy and some of the new features, let me explain why I’m giving Quark the benefit of the doubt and not qualifying every point with a “wait and see” statement.

  1. I don’t know if this is the “new” Quark, and I don’t care as much as I use to. In the last few years we’ve all been betrayed by trusted brands and learned the hard way that customer loyalty is a one-way street. We’ll buy a $30,000 car from a company we know nothing about, yet we get all emotional over a $900 software product. Quark has at least been consistent, even when dysfunctional, and hasn’t shifted resources to other products at the first hint of market decline.
  2. I sincerely believe Quark has addressed its customer service issues, and I’ve spoken to a number of users impressed by the change. If you are still holding a grudge against Quark for past deeds, it may be time to kiss and make up.
  3. I don’t like outsourcing any more than you do, but it’s a reality of global business. While Quark was a little early to shift jobs to India, there are engineers, programmers, and product managers in Denver who understand what their customers do, and those are the Quark employees calling the shots. XPress has been notorious for its complicated computer code, and I don’t think the ambitious changes in XPress 7.0 would be possible without a big team of programmers somewhere cheaper than America.
  4. Most people now working on XPress seem oblivious to the old ways of Quark and impress me as smart and sincere. The atmosphere in Denver these days is casual, open, and diverse — somewhat different than that of Adobe, a $1.5 billion corporation. The paranoia of the past seems to be in check, and all of my questions were answered with more detail than requested.

I won’t speculate on when XPress 7.0 will ship or if all the touted features will actually make it into the final release. All of the items I’m covering in this article have been demonstrated to me in working software, and I was free to sit down and play with 7.0 during my visit.
The Case for Open Standards
Quark has essentially re-written XPress from the ground up to add support for a slew of open standards and to make it easy for third-party developers to create never-before-possible custom features. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that Quark’s XML strategy seems compelling, and with a little imagination you can easily envision XPress 7.0 hastening the arrival of true cross-media, automated page production that integrates well with enterprise data systems. Those of you who design one-off brochures and business cards may be nodding off right about now, but keep an open mind — some of these things will benefit every user.
Adobe InDesign has an open XML strategy as well, and both companies have embraced XML as the link between page-layout and other forms of information publishing. But with the huge installation of XPress worldwide, I think Quark’s actions have a better chance of moving the ball more quickly forward in the quest for XML-based publishing workflows.
QXML, the new Document Object Model in XPress 7.0, will eventually give developers industry-standard read and write access to all XPress page content, including formatting, style sheets, and hyphenation and justification specifications. This will, hopefully, mean that the values we place on design and formatting aren’t lost in an automated, data-driven publishing model. A lot of high-volume page production is outsourced to India and China, where companies are building very advanced publishing systems. To deal with this new reality, the creative community has to get out of production mode and focus on the value of design (which is now stuck in native file formats). I think much of what Quark is doing will not only preserve, but could even expand the contribution designers make. But we have to face that no one wants to pay designers to crank out volumes of individual pages. That’s going to have to happen on the fly.
By implementing a JDF-compliant Job Jacket system in XPress 7.0, Quark is stimulating better and more efficient interaction between publishers and its production partners. Again, it’s hard to get all hot and bothered about something like a job jacket, and this is one of those features that may take some time to appreciate. Quark can’t force all the benefits to manifest themselves — it can only create the container and hooks for others. But you can imagine the potential benefits when an XPress job carries a huge amount of standard information with it that defines parameters and intent and has approval and contact information, output specifications, and a host of other information, all of it easily accessible to both people and production systems. Your printer can, for example, send you a Job Jacket that has all the output settings pre-configured to the press and paper your job will run on. Then you can soft-proof it to your screen based on that data, and when you go to make the PDF files, they’ll be done directly to the printers’ specs. Quark Job Jackets should move us even closer to a time when jobs move through the production process with little human intervention, which is the only way we’re going to cut costs and hasten time to market.
Quark is also supporting the Personalized Print Markup Language (PPML) in XPress 7.0. PPML creates a standard way to handle variable data in XPress pages. It isn’t completely clear that PPML will be the solution to variable-data publishing, but it’s a reasonably safe bet, and all we have right now. The slow adoption of on-demand digital printing is partly because it’s not that easy to merge a database of information with highly formatted page composition. Built-in PPML support opens the door a little wider for those designers and marketing folks who recognize that personalization is an important service to offer.
And though I suppose this may fit better under the “improved typography” category, XPress will now support the most common (though not all) OpenType features and is now Unicode compliant. This is clearly late, but there it is.


XPress 7.0 will support 23 of the most popular OpenType features (slightly less than in Adobe Creative Suite). You will be able to mix languages in the same paragraph in XPress, and spell check in multiple languages.



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Gene Gable has spent a lifetime in publishing, editing and the graphic arts and is currently a technology consultant and writer. He has spoken at events around the world and has written extensively on graphic design, intellectual-property rights, and publishing production in books and for magazines such as Print, U&lc, ID, Macworld, Graphic Exchange, AGI, and The Seybold Report. Gene's interest in graphic design history and letterpress printing resulted in his popular columns "Heavy Metal Madness" and "Scanning Around with Gene" here on CreativePro.com.
  • dblatner says:

    As a longtime QX user (now ID user), I’m pleased to see that Quark is innovating. I agree strongly that features such as QuarkVista are very cool and I hope to see this kind of thing in InDesign someday. However, Gene also misses a few important points.

    For example, InDesign has already offered an XML-based “document model” for a couple of years (INX) but hasn’t talked much about it. Why is Quark getting the attention for their vaporware XML system now?

    Gene’s comments about the importance of transparent type rasterizing is very wrong: Quality is of the utmost importance when it comes to these features. It took Adobe 3 versions of their software to get transparency to work properly. I find it hard to believe that Quark will come up with something robust enough to satisfy creative professionals on the first try.

    That said, the best news is that Quark’s innovation and drive will help all users: those who are sticking with the old technology will benefit by 2007, and those who use InDesign will benefit because Adobe will be forced to leapfrog Quark yet again.

  • anonymous says:

    I recently changed jobs going from InDesign BACK to Quark. It is very frustrating. Quark has a long way to go to clean up its current bugs. The table function (which I was excited about a few years back) crashes constantly. InDesign is much more stable. The fraction function in the type styles is great, but doesn’t mesh with style sheets. Master pages are great, until you move something…I just hope 7 not only comes up with new features, but fixes the current features that seem to have got so far and stoped. The print world is Quarks bread and butter-don’t forget that Quark.
    The ease with Photoshop in InDesign and the package price make it a much more attractive change. Working in a company situation where the MACs are far outnumbered by PCs, the expense of upgrading is met with an ‘ouch!’ Why didn’t Quark buy Macromedia and really challenge Adobe?
    I would like to tell these things to Quark, but go to there web site and there is no one to tell this to (only praises of there customer service seem to get to them.) So please Mr. Gable, let Quark know that we are cheering for them but they need to so there part to support the print world.

    db

  • anonymous says:

    I appreciate Mr. Gable’s insight regarding the realistic approach to enhancing a great application. As a dedicated Quark user for over fifteen years, I look on with envy at some of InDesign’s features but also with growing concerns of a monopolistic design toolbox(especially in light of Adobe’s pending acquisition of Macromedia). Here comes the venerable workhorse Quark swinging back into the ring with some promising enhancements to keep competition healthy and foster innovation. I like the fact that version 7 offers improvements and new functionality, yet offers it in a way that will feel comfortable and familiar to veteran Quark users. I’ve written several times to Quark expressing my wish for a “print-only” version of Quark, and it appears that version 7, while positioning itself for on-line content development and an XML workflow, still has plenty of considerations and product development for those of us who use Quark for traditional print design and publishing. I’m optimistic that this next version will offer plenty of new features and enhanced productivity that will only make my day-to-day workflow more efficient and pleasing.

  • anonymous says:

    I’ll believe it when Quark 7 is released, gets taken for a drive, … and comes back with no bugs on the windscreen.

    Andrew

  • anonymous says:

    With all due respect to my good friend, Gene, I smell a sales job. I’m sure that he is only trying to give Quark the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, but the question is, after all the years of neglecting their users, have they really earned it? Creative Suite 2 is real. QuarkXPress 7 is still vaporware. InDesign works, and it works really well. QuarkXPress is still miles behind. Should we have faith in a company that just fired its president, and that has a history of delivering new versions that are not ready for prime time? I made the switch to InDesign almost two years ago (after 14 years in XPress), and I wouldn’t think of going back. Aside from everything else, I haven’t heard anything about QXP7 to suggest that it supports the fully bi-directional cross-media publishing workflow that I need which allows me to generate both print and rich PDF, and which I have today with InDesign. And it will only get better once Macromedia is part of Adobe. Quark 7? Too little, too late.

  • anonymous says:

    As a QXP user since before it had a version code, I must say that the last few releases have been bitter sweet. I spent a good part of my pre-press career, flogging XPress over Pagemaker to all of our clients, now I have to sing a different song.

    I switched to InDesign last November, and although there was a learning curve for myself (and my peers) – I must say I am converted. It would take a heck of alot of convincing to make me switch back now. The interface that takes you through the 3 most widely used pieces of software in the print world is seamless. I find the times that I am now “forced” to produce something in Quark frustrating. I wish that they could have been as pro-active as Adobe.

    It’s really unfortunate, but they (Quark) have lost yet another loyal user – to a superior product.

    hw – ottawa

  • anonymous says:

    Where’s the loyalty? Like everyone else that’s been in this business for the last 15 years I too have grown up with Quark. I remember the days where Quark could rotate text and Pagemaker could not. Quark was the best thing ever when it came to publishing. We all hated Pagemaker, especially once I started working for a prepress shop. Don’t get me wrong I love InDesign and I have been right there with you feeling the pain from Quark’s recent blunders, but where’s the loyalty? Quark has always been there for us listening to our concerns. Sure they have been slow to react, maybe even down right stalled for awhile. But I for one will not disown them; especially after all of the years I’ve enjoyed success because of their software. Quark was there for us when Pagemaker was the thorn in all of our sides. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt here and look forward to this new improved Quark 7. Maybe, just maybe their back on track, I for one would much rather see a two horse race. There’s always more incentive to improve when you’re being pushed by the competition. Quark has found that out the hard way. I’m looking forward to the next release and I for one hope it’s everything we want/need it to be.

  • anonymous says:

    When founder Tim Gill left Quark in October 2000, many of the people responsible for QXP 3.31 and 4.11 left as well or were fired by Fred Ebrahimi and headed off to Adobe. The work of these ex-Quark engineers can be seen in what they helped accomplish with InDesign. What troubles me are two things. The first is the shipping of high-level jobs overseas to save money (let’s not forgot what Quark charges for a new copy and upgrades). Plus the money they make from developers who make third-party Xtensions (whom they charge for that privilege). Sorry, but if you want to be a U.S. corporation, don’t go outside the country for cheap labor and tax breaks. The second is what I got in the mail the other day. Xray magazine, which is nothing more than a giant catalog of third-party extensions that literally bring Quark 6.5 up to parity with Indesign CS.

    To me, Quark developed a killer app right up to 4.11, and after that, someone (Glen Turpin? Fred Ebrahimi?) made the decision to leave all the actual time-saving, “cool” features to third parties. It had become nothing more than a vehicle for plugins. A high-octane word processor that barely handled tables and layers. QX-Tools did more and better than any release after 4.11. So, now they are under new management (again), and InDesign has woke the sleeping giant. And that, in my opinion, is why competition is necessary. From both sides. And I sincerely hope that no one wins the DP race. I’d even like to see a third contender. And please, Quark, dispose of the HTML nonsense once and for all. Create another program for web creation (God knows, nothing new has come down the pike in a while), but don’t build the beast any bigger.

  • anonymous says:

    It is very hard to get excited about an upgrade that has no release date and that merely attempts to match the feature set of InDesign. I have used QXP since version 1. Once 3.2 came around Quark seemed to have gotten it right, finally, but that was it. Quark truly let its users know that it was aware of its monopoly; no presence at trade shows or any other support outlet. The advent of OSX was duly ignored, and simple modern OS improvements, such as drag and drop, never made it into QXP’s outdated interface, while the company dabbled in overpriced multimedia and web design options. Even with version 6.5 the default typographic settings remain the same abysmal ones that generate simply horrible looking text. The bezier drawing tools are poorly implemented and counter-intuitive to those who use Photoshop and Illustrator. Simple improvements were only offered by other parties as expensive plug-ins.

    Suddenly InDesign appears on the scene, and even the fact that plenty of users tried it out of desperation for an alternative didn’t register on Quark’s radar. Not too long thereafter, Adobe had it ready for prime time, allowing us all to finally switch to OSX and enjoy its thoroughly modern environment, along with all the features we had wished to see in QXP for years. It came with a great deal of liberation by allowing a natural workflow, instead of forcing users to adopt their creative habits to the constraints of poorly-designed software.

    If the history of Photoshop is any indicator, I am not at all worried about what Adobe might do with its new superiority in the page layout arena. Adobe has treated its monopoly in the image editing software area with great respect for the users, continuously providing better and innovative solutions at a reasonable cost. If Quark had done the same, we would not be reading this meager apologetic account of what might be ahead: far too little, far too late.

    If there is any question of loyalty, it ought to be posed to Quark. Where were they all those years when they were simply enjoying the automatic revenue, tormenting us with dongles and utter disregard to our needs? At the other end of the pricey help line?

    This preview sounds like the author was writing on behalf of Quark, and still couldn’t quite get himself to praise the piece of vaporware as requested.

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