Layer improvements. Quark introduced the Layers palette with XPress 5. Both XPress 6 and InDesign 2 now support document-wide layers that can be useful for separating content during creation and output, and for controlling versioning. Layers work similarly in the two applications. While the XPress 6 version still has some strange limitations (you can’t work with layers on master pages, for example), it has one layer feature that Adobe should emulate: In XPress, text runarounds are layer-specific; in InDesign they apply to all layers.
Version 6 also adds some new improvements to layer handling. You can now choose at output time (in the Print dialog box) whether each layer is to be printed or not. (InDesign layers that are turned off in the Layers palette cannot be printed.) You can now select all objects on a layer with a context menu. (In InDesign, you can do this by Option- or Alt-clicking a layer’s name.) And XPress 6 finally respects when a layer is locked and prevents you from selecting layer items. In XPress 5, you could still select and modify items on a locked layer.
Table progress. XPress 5 and InDesign 2 both introduced the ability to create tables, but they chose notably different implementations. In XPress 5, you create a table by selecting the Tables tool. After you drag it out and specify its initial structure (number of rows and columns), you have a table that is essentially a series of grouped text or picture boxes. By contrast, selecting the Insert Table command when inside a text frame in InDesign 2 creates a table that can flow with text through linked frames. Graphics can be included in an InDesign table, but they are inline.
In XPress 5, you couldn’t make a table’s background transparent or get rid of gridlines; both were always opaque. InDesign 2 has no problem setting tables strokes or fills to None (transparent), a color or a gradient. XPress 6 now remedies these obvious limitations. You can apply None or a color to a table box, a cell or the gridlines in a table. You can also now link cells together, either automatically or manually. This could be useful for flowing text from cell to cell. You can specify the tab order of cells, either when you create a table or after creation in the Modify dialog box.
However, when compared with InDesign 2’s table implementation, XPress still lacks some essential features. Many tables come to page layout from Word or Excel documents. InDesign 2 can import these tables directly, retaining their structure and attributes. To bring these tables into XPress, you first have to export them as tab-delimited text, then use XPress’s Convert Text to Table command. XPress 6 table cells are rigidly constrained to a fixed height; InDesign’s cells can either be of a fixed height or can auto-expand when text is added to them. InDesign also supports multipage tables and tables that have automatic alternate tinting of rows and columns.
Other print features.There are a couple of output enhancements (besides the new layer print controls) in XPress 6. You can now choose two new options when outputting as composite color (see Figure 5). When printing or exporting as PDF or EPS, you can choose As Is color. This leaves colored objects in their original color space. The Device N choice can be used for print layouts with duotones, spot-color blends, etc., to leave objects with their color definitions for separation by a PostScript RIP (in-RIP separations).
Figure 5: Color printing choices. XPress 6 now supports leaving objects in their original color space (As Is color) and allows Device N color when printing or exporting PDF and EPS files.
Web enhancements. The biggest new features introduced in XPress 5 were for creating Web pages. Quark believes that many of its users will want to leverage their knowledge of creating print pages and use the same tools to create pages for the Web. In addition to being able to use their text, picture box, and table tools, XPress 5 and 6 users can use tools to create form fields (buttons, popup menus and so on), hyperlinks, image maps and rollovers. InDesign 2 doesn’t have most of these features (it does have a Hyperlinks palette), but it lets you export HTML via the Export HTML dialog box. Both applications do a reasonably good job of retaining the page geometry — XPress by using invisible tables, InDesign by using CSS absolute positioning. Both turn your TIFF images into GIF or JPEG files, but XPress lets you control the conversion of individual images
XPress 6 expands on these features by adding cascading menus, enhanced rollovers and the ability to create font families for cascading style sheets. Cascading menus are the Web feature where new menu choices appear when you move your mouse pointer over a specific menu item. You can still create the basic rollovers of XPress 5, but now you can also create more complex two-position rollovers: When you mouse over an item, an object can be displayed in another area of the page. The value of being able to specify fonts is that if the person viewing your page doesn’t have the font you used, you can specify alternate font options.
We know of almost no XPress users who are using these Web features, however. Most users who are concerned about repurposing their print files are exporting their HTML, recreating their graphics with the more capable controls in Adobe Photoshop, and using Web-authoring applications such as Dreamweaver and GoLive to create their Web sites. Some are using XML. Neither XPress nor InDesign offer the site- management capabilities or the sophisticated features of Web-authoring software. However, there may be some users who might use XPress for an occasional quick project that doesn’t need that degree of control.
XML and beyond. With the introduction of XPress 5 and InDesign 2, both Quark and Adobe began to promote XML features in their products. XPress 6 has somewhat enhanced the feature set of the XTensions it uses for XML. The sidebar “XML and XPress 6.0,” by Deborah Lapeyre, goes into detail on this subject.
Activation. A less welcome addition to XPress 6 is a new security scheme called activation. Quark has always been very concerned with software piracy, and in the past it required hardware dongles in some markets. With XPress 6, it has done away with dongles, but it now requires that all copies of XPress be activated — either over the Internet or by phone. (Registration is optional, but registration is required for the Full Resolution feature to work.) When activating, XPress sends no personal data, but it ties a serial number to your particular hardware configuration. If you attempt to launch XPress without activating, you can operate it normally for five days, but then it switches to demo mode. In demo mode, you can’t save files and your prints and exports have the words “XPress Demo” in very large letters. InDesign 2 uses no such protection system.
Compatibility with earlier versions. There are two issues of compatibility that will be of concern to XPress 6 users: saving backwards to earlier versions, and the investment in older XTensions. XPress 6 can save files with either Version 5 or 6 compatibility — but not version 4. This could present a problem for workgroups where not everyone is upgrading to XPress 6. As a painful workaround, you could use XPress 6 to save backward to XPress 5, then open the file in version 5 (if you have it) to save back to version 4.
Many XPress users have come to depend on certain third-party XTensions in earlier versions of XPress. With the move to Mac OS X and XPress 6, all previous XTensions will break. If any are essential to your workflow, you’ll need to contact the vendor to find out if they plan on updating them to the new version.
Pricing. The single-copy list price for XPress has now been increased to $1,045 in the U.S. However, nobody pays list, and the street price runs about $890. (This is almost $200 more than Adobe InDesign 2.) The upgrade price depends on which version you are upgrading from: $199 from XPress 5 and $299 from XPress 4.x. Since XPress 6 still only supports one language, you’ll still need the pricier Passport edition if you need hyphenation and dictionaries for multiple languages; the cost for Passport wasn’t available at press time. Quark still charges an extra $50 for a paper manual; InDesign comes with one in the box.
This article was last modified on January 11, 2022
This article was first published on July 29, 2003
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