QuarkXPress 6: Another Point of View from The Seybold Report

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When it launched XPress 6 on June 10, Quark ended the wait for one of the most anticipated software releases in recent years. Seventeen months after its competitor, Adobe InDesign 2, was released in a Macintosh OS X version, Quark has released a product that runs fully native in OS X. It also brings with it some substantial new features. The question addressed in this review is whether this release is too little, too late.

The page-layout landscape has changed since our January 2002 comparison of XPress 5 and InDesign 2 (download the PDF here — be patient it takes a minute to load). Quark’s release of version 5 was largely a dud, both with reviewers and with its customers. Relatively few XPress users upgraded; most stuck with the 4.1 release (or even older versions). While XPress 5 offered new ways of creating Web pages and some enhanced XML controls in its avenue.quark XTension, it provided only minor improvements for print customers — primarily a table tool and the ability to work with layers.

Meanwhile, the Macintosh world has changed completely: In January 2002, Mac OS X had relatively few applications beyond those offered by Apple itself, and it was still an operating system in development. Now, after the release of OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and six subsequent updates, this operating system is stable, and Quark has been the last major publishing holdout in switching to the new OS.

The wait has irked more than a few users; Apple has needed patience as well. It announced in 2002 that, beginning in January 2003, no more computers would be shipped that could boot into Mac OS 9. Then Apple relented, apparently because of pressure from XPress customers, and extended its deadline until June 2003. Applications being released this year (for example, Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional) now run only in current operating systems — Windows 2000 and XP, and Mac OS X. With its late support for Mac OS X, Quark almost didn’t make it to the party.

Quark’s strategy. Quark needs to make a successful entry into the Mac OS X operating system. It also has to offer enough significant feature enhancements for its customer base to upgrade. Otherwise, it will face the same problem it did with XPress 5, where most of its customers weren’t convinced of a need for a change.

In the meantime, Adobe hasn’t been sitting on the sidelines. It has continued to develop InDesign. Based on the usual Adobe product cycles, we can expect to see another InDesign version later this year. Quark can no longer slide through its new product releases as it seemed to do through most of the ’90s, when it had little competition. Many customers have been waiting to see how XPress 6 looks before switching to Mac OS X. (XPress 5 can run in Classic mode in Mac OS X, but this can be painful, with frequent redraw problems.) But Quark cannot take their loyalty for granted. Since changing operating systems already requires faster computers and some retraining, the users might also think it makes sense to switch page-layout applications at the same time.

The Transition to OS X
With XPress 6, the application has made a largely successful transition to the Mac OS X environment. When you open XPress 6, it shows the more modern Aqua look, from its blue scroll bars to the gray patterned lines on the title bars of windows. But, to an XPress user, it will still look very familiar. Most of the commands and dialog boxes are exactly where you’d find them in earlier versions of the application. The only changes have been minor; some of the dialog boxes are a bit larger to match OS X interface standards.

Quark has now wholeheartedly made the jump to OS X: The new Mac version will run only in OS X, and won’t run in OS 9 or in Classic mode. (On the Windows side, XPress 6 will run only in Windows 2000 or XP.) It takes advantage of important OS X features such as the Print Center, better font antialiasing, better memory management, and protected memory. You no longer have to worry about taking down your operating system when XPress crashes.

However, XPress doesn’t take advantage of the graphic acceleration features of Mac OS X. And while it uses the operating system to rasterize PostScript, TrueType, and OpenType fonts, it doesn’t recognize any of the extra characters in an OpenType font that an OS X Cocoa application can.

Apple’s OS X interface standards have also forced some organizational changes in XPress’s menus. There is a new XPress menu where you find the application preferences and the commands to hide or quit the application. In addition, XPress’s list of palettes has now moved to a new Window menu, along with the window controls.

New Features
While the move to OS X will have automatic appeal to the Mac loyalists who have been long awaiting its migration, other users are more concerned with the new features this version brings, and in how those features stack up to those in Adobe InDesign. We will describe the important changes.

Projects and layouts. For users of XPress 4 and 5, the feature that initially will cause the most confusion is XPress 6’s new file-management features. Version 6 introduces two new concepts: projects and layouts. When you create a new file in XPress 6, you now open the New Project dialog box. While this has many of the same controls as the New Document dialog box from XPress 4 and 5, you’re now asked for a Layout Name and a Layout Type — you can choose either print or Web.

While XPress 5 allows you to create Web documents, they are totally separate from print documents; you can only move items between the two types by copying and pasting, or dragging and dropping. In XPress 6, Web and print layouts are now unified within the project fold. You can create as many as 25 layouts within the same project. This means that if you are creating, for example, a letterhead, a second sheet, a notepad, and a Web page, they can all be stored in the same file, called a project.

You work with layouts from the new Layout menu. When you want to create a new one, you choose New from the Layout menu and target it for either print or Web. Each layout appears as a tab at the bottom of your project window (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Multi-layout files. You can include more than one layout in a file (now called a project) so you can synchronize text and certain attributes. Each layout appears as a tab at the bottom of the window.

Layouts within the same project share the attributes that are exchanged in the XPress Append dialog boxes. These include style sheets, colors, h&js, dashes and stripes, lists and hyperlinks. For Web layouts, they also include menus, font families, meta tags and cascading menus. When one of these attributes is changed in one layout — the colors in your letterhead, for example — they are synchronized in all the layouts. Other features aren’t shared between layouts: Each one has its own master pages, layers, and Print or Web Layout preferences (formerly Document Preferences), for example.

You can duplicate and delete layouts from the Layout menu, or with a context menu. Since each layout can have its own size, orientation, and margins, there is no more Document Setup; instead, each layout has its own Layout Properties dialog box. Unlike XPress 5, you can now change a layout between print and Web. When you do this, items on the page may be changed to meet the requirements of the new media when you export the HTML. When switching from a print to a Web layout, a TIFF image becomes a GIF or JPEG, for example.

Having multiple layouts can work well when you have simple layouts where you’re sharing attributes you want to keep synchronized. You can also synchronize text in multi-layout projects (see below).

However, while this new layout metaphor shows promise, it’s often not well thought-out. You can’t view more than one layout at the same time. Since XPress (unlike InDesign 2) doesn’t support multiple windows into the same file, this can make it extremely awkward when you want to compare two layouts. Layouts can’t share master pages and guides. The workaround for this is to remember to use the Duplicate command when you begin a layout, copying your master pages and guides from another layout. Since XPress doesn’t allow you to copy guides from one layout to another, this makes it difficult to keep layouts that need precise positioning in concert.

This lack of thoughtfulness about file management even applies to long document and printing features. Book files (used to manage multiple chapters) don’t support projects that contain more than one layout. And when printing a multi-layout project with registration marks and labels, the name of the project, but not the layout, appears on the output — a fact that is sure to cause much anguish at service providers.

Text synchronization. A related new feature is text synchronization. When you have two or more layouts in the same project — whether print or Web — they can share the same text. When text in a text box is synchronized in the new Synchronized Text palette, changing the text in one layout changes the linked text in all the layouts (see Figure 2). This could be useful to handle an address change, for example, between the layouts in the same project.

Figure 2: Syncing text. As long as you have your layouts in the same file, you can make sure text stays “in sync” using the new Synchronized Text palette. For example, changing the address in one layout changes it in all the others.

Synchronization applies only to the content of the text box, not how it’s formatted. There are some significant limitations: You can synchronize text, but not pictures. (In fact, each layout has its own Picture Usage controls, which could make graphic management between layouts confusing.) Synchronization always works with all the text in a text box, not just part of it. It doesn’t apply to text on master pages, and synchronized text can’t be shared between different files.

PDF without Distiller. Since PDF workflows are playing an increasingly large role in most organizations, InDesign 2 has had a major advantage over XPress 5: It can create PDF files without the purchase of Adobe Acrobat. To counter that advantage, Quark has licensed the Jaws RIP from Global Graphics Software for PDF creation and full-resolution previews (which we’ll discuss later on). To create PDFs in XPress 6, you choose Export as PDF from the File menu. XPress creates PostScript for your pages and then processes it through the Jaws RIP to create the PDF.

Most XPress users will welcome the direct creation of PDF files in XPress 6. Your options are similar to the choices you have for creating PDF in XPress 4 and 5: You can export Document Information and hyperlinks, including those created with the Lists and Indexes features. You can choose some (but not all) of the options found in Distiller for image compression and font embedding. Unlike InDesign 2, you can choose to create separate PDF, as well as the usual composite output.

However, when compared with InDesign 2, XPress’s PDF creation still comes up short. While XPress 6 is considerably faster than earlier versions of XPress, when we tested a late-beta and a release-demo version in Mac OS X, we found creating PDFs notably slower than in InDesign. Quark now supports only PDF 1.3 (Acrobat 4) compatibility. It doesn’t support the ability to save settings, nor does it work with the Distiller settings files that many service providers supply. While InDesign 2 doesn’t support using Distiller settings either, it does allow you to create similar PDF Styles that can be shared. XPress 6 has no way to support the new PDF/X capabilities found in Acrobat 6 Professional. And, as an annoyance to users who don’t have PostScript printers, it is necessary to create and switch to an OS X virtual PostScript printer to use the PDF feature.

Full-resolution previews. Another feature on which XPress 4 and 5 had been criticized was the poor quality of its graphic previews. (The freeware version of Enhance Preview XT that was included with XPress let you build a better preview of pixel-based images, but this didn’t work with vector art.) InDesign uses the Adobe Graphics Manager to quickly build high-resolution previews of any graphic format it supports — including EPS, PDF, and native Illustrator and Photoshop formats.

Version 6 brings some welcome relief for XPress users. Quark’s license agreement with Global Graphics Software gives it access to the libraries of the Jaws RIP to create Full Resolution previews. It works by storing cache files on your hard drive. (You can change an application preference to set the maximum cache size.) Selecting Preview Resolution, via the Item menu or a context menu, shows a preview of the graphic, which you can toggle between Low and Full Resolution (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Crisp previews. Using the new Jaws RIP technology, XPress 6 can now produce full-resolution previews of vector and bitmapped graphics. You can choose this option for a selected image by using the context menu shown here.

Nonetheless, we found some limitations. InDesign produces crisp previews at up to 4,000 percent magnification; XPress is limited to 800 percent. When working with bitmapped images, the speed of caching images and scrolling is comparable with InDesign. But, using a late-beta version of XPress, we found it noticeably slower when creating a Full Resolution preview of a simple EPS file. On a 400-MHz G3 iMac, scrolling was painfully slow. We also had problems with two simple Illustrator 8 EPS files — one crashed XPress, and the other didn’t preview an embedded font correctly. Unfortunately, the post-release demo version we have doesn’t include the Full Resolution preview feature, so we can’t say whether these problems have been resolved.

Multiple undo at last. While almost every other graphic application (including InDesign) has long supported multiple undos, XPress users have suffered from its limited ability to undo actions. XPress 6 greatly improves the situation. It lets you undo as many as 30 actions; the specific number and the shortcut for Redo can be set as an application preference.

Not only does XPress 6 support undoing multiple actions, but it even provides Undo and Redo popup menus at the bottom of the project window, where you can select the state you want to return to (see Figure 4). While this is not as sophisticated as Photoshop’s History palette, it is usually quite effective. You can undo many actions that earlier versions couldn’t, such as importing text and pictures. But there are still some you can’t undo (e.g., actions when working with pages or guides). InDesign 2 has no such limitations, but it also has no Undo/Redo popup.

Figure 4: Undo magic. While not as sophisticated as the Photoshop History palette, XPress 6’s Undo and Redo popup menus are quite useful.


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Steve Werner is a trainer, consultant, and co-author (with David Blatner and Christopher Smith) of InDesign for QuarkXPress Users and Moving to InDesign. He has worked in the graphic arts industry for more than 20 years and was the training manager for ten years at Rapid Lasergraphics. He has taught computer graphics classes since 1988.
  • anonymous says:

    This article covers just about everything you need to make a decision to use Quark or InDesign. Great article.

  • anonymous says:

    Complete and concise report of Xpress 6 features vs. InDesign. Thanks

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