QuarkXPress 4.04
Ever since QuarkXPress came on the publishing scene in 1987, it has had a major impact on the digital way of publishing on paper. Though it became available on the Windows platform rather late, many prominent publishers of magazines and dailies migrated to it with alacrity. Quark came out with its version 3.3 sometime in early 1994, and did not even bother about an upgrade for the next four years. Nor did it set about offering much in the way of technical support to its large installed user base.
Holes and bugs were fixed more by third-party Xtensions rather than the vendorÆs own QuarkXtensions. Yet, most Quark users swear by the product. The best compliment to Quark comes from its arch-rival Adobe. While introducing its brand new, state-of-the-art InDesign, Adobe proudly described it as the æQuark KillerÆ. That speaks volumes. Quark claims a user base of over 2 million-and we are talking only about legal copies!
Requirements
XPress works on meagre resources, taking up just over 22 MB of disk space. Installation is rather cumbersome, what with a hardware lock and a couple of floppy disks to tangle with. Rather an unfriendly way to begin, you might think. Upgrades come from the Web, and usually work only on a legal copy, even if you happen to be a pirate who gets around the floppy disk obstacle. QuarkXPressÆs cross-platform capability is a real boon to large corporate publishers who often have Windows, Mac and NT cohabiting under one roof. XPress has a multiple-language version called QuarkXPress Passport. æMultipleÆ here means European languages, which is not likely to interest many Indian publishers.
Loading is quick and efficient, even under Windows, though the Quark Logo stays on the screen till you open a file. Unlike many other applications, Quark doesnÆt show you a short list of files you recently opened. Unless you had opened the ten-odd palettes and left them that way the last time you closed Quark, the screen is clean with an economically designed menu bar and the floating tool bar.
To the uninitiated, the Item tool and the Content tool at the top of the tool bar would appear intimidating. Item is generally a box-a text box or a picture box. Content is text or picture. If you had checked the æAutomatic Text BoxÆ option while selecting File > New > Document, the new opening page takes in mainstream text by default. Otherwise, every content, text or graphic goes into its respective box only. Text and picture boxes can be coloured-with fourteen or more shades and several blends-and framed in a variety of ways. Boxes can be sized to microscopic dimensions (1/1000 points, if you insist).
Quark gives you six shapes of text boxes, including a free-hand shape and a BΘzier-curve shape. This is something others will take time to match. Unlike in PageMaker, you do not have to rush back to CorelDRAW or Illustrator to create artistic text. Quark lets you manipulate text in a variety of ways, and fit it into the shape of any curve, or inside or outside a closed path. You can highlight a bit of text and convert it into a BΘzier outline box and use it for filling text or picture-something you thought you could only do in graphic programs! It is another matter that InDesign and Ventura can do it too.
Quark comes with a very passable built-in word processor. It can import older versions of Microsoft Word, WordPerfect and RTF without any loss. Tab positions are retained, though the application cannot handle tables or spreadsheets of any kind. Use of XPress tags makes it possible to export text for copyediting and import it back without any change in formatting. However, these tags, which are really formatting codes in ASCII, can make editing difficult. You would need to import equations (unless you create them laboriously using symbols), charts, graphs and tables as pictures. A very cumbersome feature for an application that claims to be a trendsetter for other page layout programs.
Typesetting features such as tracking, kerning, leading and baseline grids are vastly improved in the newer versions. Quark lacks a Story Editor, but its onscreen edit functions are mostly adequate. Hyphen and Justification are good, but need to get a little more professional. You can create style sheets for paragraphs as well as characters, and trade them among documents. The text-box linking technique and the arrow indicator that straddle several pages in QuarkXPress remain unchanged. We have always held that PageMakerÆs window shades are more intuitive, but there seem to be more supporters for QuarkÆs links. Newspaper and magazine publishers can use the Ctrl-4 and Ctrl-2 shortcuts to create the æContinued on...Æ and æContinued from...Æ page numbers, though the text part will have to be manually typed in.
Unlike in older versions, text runaround outside a picture is no longer woefully one-sided. You can not only run text around both sides (as well as top and bottom) of the picture box, but also into the æholesÆ or white parts inside the picture itself. Text within a rectangular text box can be vertically aligned using the Modify menu.
Quark has finally come up with a Book feature to match that of PageMaker, but it still falls short. You can now assemble a number of files into a book, manipulate and reorganise them, and rearrange their page numbers automatically. Multi-level Indexing and Table Of Contents feature come as an Xtension, but lacks the maturity and stability of similar features in PageMaker. In Quark, you had better index your entries after all the chapters are assembled into a book; otherwise the indexing could go haywire. On the other hand, PageMaker deals faithfully with indexing codes inserted even in Microsoft Word before import.
Improved graphics handling
Version 4 improves on graphics handling features. You can now convert a colour image to greyscale, greyscale to line art and so on. Contrast and brightness can be controlled without going back to the image-editing program. However, there is no option to add transparency to an imported picture. You still cannot directly import an image in the Photoshop format. An imported picture can be cropped (or masked) simply by adjusting the picture box size, and by moving the picture (with the Content tool) inside. The BΘzier tool does away with the rigid constraints of rectangular or oval boxes and shapes. Quark can create clipping paths within itself (based on white areas, imported alpha channel or an embedded path) and reshape this path with the BΘzier tool. One can draw a number of shapes and merge them to create a new shape. Picture and text boxes as well as created lines and objects can be anchored to flow with the mainstream text.
æCollect for OutputÆ was another concept QuarkXPress was acclaimed for. This makes it possible to collect all the files linked to a main document in one folder before sending it to Business Bureau in the open format. Quark, however, does not æcollectÆ the fonts that might not be available at the bureau. Colour separation, Screen frequency and dot functions can be controlled for individual spot or process colours. Automatic trapping with preset specifications is another interesting feature. The application has excellent control over print-whether into a hard copy, or as a File.
When you try to export a QuarkXPress file into another publishing medium, you realise that Quark is stuck in a time warp-in the early nineties, to be precise. You can export a page in EPS format, but not as a PDF file. So you can forget about on-demand publishing. After much grumbling from users, Quark has come up with an HTML feature, but it applies only to the text part of the document. A Quark user may still need to buy expensive third-party Xtensions before his professional needs are fully satisfied.