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Software Wish List: QuarkXPress®

These days the average SME publishes a considerable amount of material. Brochures, adverts, catalogues, leaflets, web sites... a whole host of formats are now fashionable when it comes to marketing a company. As a result, desktop publishing packages have become even more relevant to SMEs - particularly those who want to save money on designers' bills. But is an upgrade in software, beyond the trusty word processing package, really worth it?

Those who have invested in QuarkXPress are likely to say yes. QuarkXPress is the ultimate desktop publishing package - the industry standard in design, publishing and advertising, and the programme behind much of the printed material we read everyday.

What's more, it's a programme that has suddenly become even more desirable. Earlier this year - after several delays - Quark 5.0 was released, heralding a new chapter in the life of Quark. QuarkXPress now has web design features that make it a design and programming programme for all mediums. Good news for those who like to do their designing once.

Since it's beginnings over a decade ago, QuarkXPress has always been outstanding as a formatting and layout programme; by the time of its 4.0 incarnation in the late nineties, it had grown into a complete design package. It's based upon a range of key tools that make it remarkably easy to manipulate and shape a document. You can create a document of any size (within generous limits), and this document appears on the screen like a sheet, or a series of sheets, of paper, which can be organised into verso/recto format. You can move around this document not only with scroll bars and arrow keys, but also with a mouse scroll facility that takes you in any direction across the page. Navigation is simply superb. There are few other programmes that give you this amount of flexibility when interacting with an electronic document.

The toolbars and menus are similarly mobile. They can be positioned anywhere on a page, placing a vast amount of options at your fingertips. The key word here is control: Quark is designed to give you total mastery over the document to the smallest detail, and easy access to all the necessary tools. You can resize elements numerically to the nth degree, or just drag the box that holds them to any dimension. You can position items manually or by using co-ordinates, and there is an excellent, easy-to-use facility whereby you can drag guides onto the screen and `snap' your items to these guides. Additionally, you can resize groups of items, with the option to scale all picture contents, text contents, frame widths, and line weights.

Quark essentially works differently to many word processing programmes in that you are given a blank canvas, into which you insert `boxes' that hold text and pictures. You have complete control over where the boxes appear, and can link any boxes - wherever they may be in a document - to eachother, flowing text from one to the other (handy for magazines). More importantly, you can layer each individual element you place on the page, and group items together in layers, opening up a host of visual possibilities.

Designed to cater for large documents, QuarkXPress also enables you to create master pages and master guides. You can set up a document to have consistent formatting, and change the look of an entire document just by altering these master guides. Style sheets allow you to set every detail of a document. You can also create `book' files consisting of different sections and chapters. A handy `document overview' box enables you to insert, delete and remove multiple pages with ease - you have complete control over the entire document set up.

Illustration is aided by the ability to draw using freehand tools and insert point-by-point and Besier text and picture boxes and text paths. You can chart clipping passages around an image and flow text around it, adjusting runaround to get the text as tight as you would like it; you can skew and rotate pictures and merge multiple picture boxes to form one single box. Colour management is another important feature: in Quark you have access to a colour spectrum that can specify a vast range of colours.

Finally comes the leap from print media to electronic media that Quark 5.0 makes. For those who have been working in Quark for several years, it marks a great opportunity to convert electronic files into web pages, and to work on web pages using familiar and flexible design tools.

Quark 5.0 now lets you import XML format, the standard format for moving data across the internet. Because web pages produced with QuarkXPress conform to open standards, they can be edited in standards-based HTML development tools such as Dreamweaver ® . You can also incorporate web-specific features such as dropdown lists, rollovers, hyperlinks, image maps, and metatags using newly incorporated toolbars.

Altogether, QuarkXPress 5.0 represents a decade of improvements to what was originally an excellent packages. Convinced by Quark? Here are a few points to consider before you rush out and buy it:

  • Expense: QuarkXPress 5.0 is an expensive piece of software. Buying direct from Quark, the complete programme sells at $899.00, and upgrading from QuarkXPress 4.0 costs $299.00 (Mac and PC version).

  • Training: You definitely need to invest in a bit of training before using Quark, if only to make the most of its features.

  • Talent: Designers are expensive, but they generally do have the creative abilities. Despite the wealth of features, Quark doesn't have a `talent' button. You could get the designers to provide templates created in Quark that you can use for many purposes.



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