E&P: XPress 7's Composition Zones Hint At Workflow Improvements

New feature to allow simultaneous collaboration on layouts, promising workflow improvements in news design.

Here, you work on this part, while I work on this.

In a col­umn online at Editor & Publisher, colum­nist Mark Fitzgerald accents a fea­ture in the yet-to-be-released QuarkXPress 7 that breaks, as the title says, the One File=One Layout equation.

XPress 7’s “Composition Zones” allow def­i­n­i­tion of permissions-based edit­ing, mean­ing a lay­out can have more than one cre­ator work­ing on con­tent while keep­ing the lay­out sacro­sanct, in a fash­ion which sounds sim­i­lar to the oper­a­tion of such pro­grams as Adobe’e InCopy. These changes can be made by a group of cre­ators simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, and are report­ed­ly updat­ed to the lay­out as they are made.

Louis A. Landa, for­mer­ly of the Boulder, CO Daily Camera and lat­ter­ly Quark’s man­ag­er of cus­tomer ini­tia­tives, illus­trat­ed the ben­e­fit this way:

I’d be doing a cap­tion or some­thing, and some­body would say, ‘C’mon, c’mon, I need that page,’ ” he said. “When I was a news­pa­per design­er, it would have been won­der­ful to take a piece of the page, and say, ‘Here, you work on this part, while I work on this.’ 

The col­umn also touch­es on oth­er tout­ed improve­ments com­ing in XPress 7, such as JDF, and men­tioned the recent Quark rebrand­ing, though not the con­tro­ver­sy amongst cre­atives over oth­er sim­i­lar logos which may, pre­sum­ably, have been seen to be out­side of the scope of the commentary.