MacAddict on QuarkXPress 6.5: "Great"

MacAddict's reviewer gives qualified "thumbs up" to the XPress 6.5 update

In a review pub­lished in the April 2005 num­ber of Mac Addict mag­a­zine and not yet avail­able online, review­er John Cruise rings in a strong pos­i­tive review of QuarkXPress’s 6.5 update.

Good News: Can’t beat the upgrade price. Nice set of image-editing fea­tures. Can import native Photoshop files. Bad News: PSD Import XTension is bug­gy and lim­it­ed. Doesn’t sup­port lay­er effects in Photoshop files,” says the review­er’s sum­ma­ry. Overall rat­ing on the mag­a­zine’s scale is 4 out of 5, or “Great.”

The review con­cerns itself, in the main, with the QuarkVista and PSD Import XTensions. Citrix XP sup­port and group­ing tables with oth­er items get a pass­ing sen­tence. Bugs with the PSD Import that are men­tioned are left and right edge arti­facts on sim­ple images, and unex­pect­ed flat­ten­ing of some import­ed files, includ­ing those with lay­er effects, on import. It also men­tioned the screen-redraw delay that was referred to in my January review on this site.

In all it is a pos­tive review that gives Quark cred­it where due. My opin­ion is that Vista and PSD Import were, while long over­due, very nec­es­sary, and the review seems to echo that, call­ing it a “sig­nif­i­cant update.”

The bot­tom line of Mac Addict’s review large­ly seems to hold with the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom expressed here and through­out the indus­try: While the update is sig­nif­i­cant, there is a fea­ture gap that has InDesign in the lead. XPress 6.5 may slow migra­tion to Adobe CS, but the make-or-break point will be QuarkXPress 7.0.