QuarkXPress 7: Thumbs Up In The UK

Review gives V7 thumbs up for powerful features

The Independent UK Logo

A review of QuarkXPress 7 has just been pub­lished in The Independent, a major dai­ly news­pa­per in the UK; it comes down strong­ly in favor of the newest ver­sion of Quark’s flagship.

Cited with praise are such items as addi­tion­al new fea­tures with­out a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of new palettes, and while the inter­face, which has suf­fered few changes since the V4.x days, seems dat­ed, this works in XPress’s favor since it keeps things as unclut­tered as the user wants. Also viewed with favor are job jack­ets, trans­paren­cy, image han­dling, and PDF expor­ta­tion. Coming in as a hit, how­ev­er, is the XPress learn­ing curve; the review­er seems to feel that new XPress users might have a dif­fi­cult go.

The brief but infor­ma­tive review by Stephen Pritchard can be read here.

8 thoughts on “QuarkXPress 7: Thumbs Up In The UK

  1. woz

    I am sor­ry but I do not feel the author has actu­al­ly USED QuarkXpress 7 to pro­duce a piece of art­work. This reads just like a press release from Quark. I would how­ev­er like to hear your pro­fes­sion­al opin­ion on the major text-bugs and cra­h­es as reviewed bij ArsTechnica (and sev­er­al oth­er sites). Also what about this .psd import? I hear it’s not com­pat­i­ble with CS2 .PSD’s. That sort of ren­ders it use­less doesn’t it?What about PDF ‑import? How will Xpress place PDF files with spot­col­ors for exam­ple? These are impor­tant fea­tures when pro­ducig a black and spot­col­or news­pa­per. Doesn’t Xpress focus on newspaper-workflows? I thought hey did…

  2. steve

    Hi Woz,Yeah you can bring in PSD files from CS2, QXP7 just doesn;t let you manip­u­late cer­tain lay­er effects but worst case it brings it in com­pos­ite. Unlike InDesign it can also auto­mat­i­cal­ly map the spot col­ors in the PSD file direct­ly into your col­ors palette and they can then be man­aged. Sure you can bring in PDFs with spot col­ors, col­or man­age­ment is way bet­ter in 7, it uses ICC pro­files. Of ocurse QuarkXPress is in major news­pa­per work­flows? Have you actu­al­ly tried ver­sion 7?

  3. hunter

    Comments from any­one on Q7’s slow­ness? We’re not about to upgrade to a slow­er piece of soft­ware, no mat­ter how fan­cy it is.

  4. woz

    Nope. I have not used Xpress 7 for my dai­ly use. (And nev­er will or I will be look­ing for anoth­er job) I’m a hap­py InDesign user. (Infact, I work here because of InDesign. I helped trans­form this agency from Xpress to InDesign). I do how­ev­er have to deal with ‘3rd party’s’ that rely on Xpress. In fact, over­here in Europe (Amsterdam) a lot of news­pa­pers still rely on Xpress 4 and/or 5. And occai­sion­aly ‘the sh*t will hit the fan’ over­there when there’s a spot­col­or in a cer­ti­fied PDF file.

    Oh and there was ‘this thing’ about Xpress 7 not see­ing the masks in P’shop….

  5. Tony Morse

    Quark 7 seems to me to be slow in odd places – like opening/converting files, print­ing, export­ing, etc. No real per­for­mance issues per se, but I have noticed that Preps 4 hates any PDF gen­er­at­ed from Quark 7 for some rea­son. Also, the way Q7 gen­er­atesd post­script puts a â€œ:” char­ac­ter in the file­name (!!) which caus­es big prob­lems when print­ing to a Unix-based server.

    In short, I’ve been work­ing with Q7 for about three weeks and have start­ed con­vert­ing all my Q7 pages direct­ly back to Q6. New fea­tures be damned.

  6. Macteach

    >Oh and there was ‘this thing’ about Xpress 7 not see­ing the masks in P’shop….

    you mean: you don’t know ho to :-)
    Just select the mask you want, right there in your controlpalet!

  7. woz

    LoL. Here it is already:
    “Also, if you use clip­ping masks for lay­er trans­paren­cy, QuarkXpress trips up. A workaround is to build an alpha chan­nel and use that as the PSD trans­paren­cy with­in XPress.”
    Read it for youre­selve and ‘teach on!’ MacTeach. :-)

  8. Macteach

    >Read it for youre­selve and ‘teach on!’ MacTeach. :-)

    In the mes­sage I read: ‘not see­ing masks’ i did net read ‘Not see­ing clip­ping path­s’. I under­stood a Mask as a alpha channel

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