Approaching its third birthday,
QPS is attracting both attention and new usersBy John Cruise

he past ...
In the late summer of 1991, about a dozen and a half Quark employees were summoned to a lunch meeting. In the preceding weeks, the buzz around the company was that something big was brewing, and there was a general feeling of excitement. It had been a little more than a year since QuarkXPress 3.0 had been released, and Quark's reputation - not to mention the company itself - was growing rapidly.

Quark president and CEO Fred Ebrahimi informed the gathering of software engineers,writers, graphic artists and technical support specialists that they would be collaborating on a project that would play a key role in the future of the company. Their task: to develop a full-blown editorial management and document tracking system around the company's flagship product, QuarkXPress.

Within a month of the initial meeting of what was dubbed "The CopyDesk Team," a smoke-and-mirrors version of the barely nascent software was demonstrated at the fall Seybold Conference. Over the next year, the software - or to be more precise, a suite of software components - began to take shape. The key pieces were a word processing application called QuarkCopyDesk that worked in tandem with XPress and a server-based application called QuarkDispatch that controlled the storage and routing of electronic files.

An editorial management and tracking application, the QuarkDispatch Planner, was added, as was another program, called QuarkDispatch FileManager, which automated the process of moving and deleting files after they are no longer needed.

Other software components included the QuarkDispatch Administrator application, for customizing system-wide features such as automatic file routing and revision control; the QuarkDispatch XTension to XPress, which links off-the-shelf QuarkXPress to the system; and QuarkConnect, a system-level utility that enables other DTP programs (including Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word and Macromedia Freehand) to be integrated into the system.

This suite of software components was to be called the Quark Publishing System, or QPS for short. (See sidebar "QPS Pieces" for more information about the QPS software components.) In December of 1992 QPS 1.0 was ready to make its debut.

"The old systems were ailing," says Susan Friedman, QPS product manager, of the circumstances that led Quark to create QPS. "There was a need for new technology. Basically, QPS was created because Quark's customers asked for it. Quark looked at the paradigms of proprietary systems with the aim of making something better, something that would let publishers create text and paginate within a single system and - more important - that, like QuarkXPress, was easy to use."

The new technology QPS 1.0 offered to Mac-based publishing sites included a number of powerful and previously unavailable features, including:

  • A set of integrated workgroup publishing tools that enabled writers, editors and page layout artists to work simultaneously on the same QuarkXPress document.

  • Real-time copyfitting for writers and editors; stories could be written/edited to fit their allotted space in a QuarkXPress document.

  • Customizable software that allowed sites with differing editorial and production processes to maintain their current methods.

  • File tracking and file management software.

  • The ability (with QuarkConnect) to integrate other DTP software into the system.

    But not all of the system's powerful features were new. Like QuarkXPress, QPS was built with an open architecture that enabled third-party developers to create XTensions for all of the applications. This means potential QPS sites that required specialized capabilities had the option to further customize the software with XTensions...

    Read more about Quarks great QPS System in the latest XRAY Magazine!

    The CyberNews was brought to You by the OnLine Staff
    Last modified: 10.12.1995