First Look At QuarkXPress 7

At the TypoTechnica 2005 conference in London Thursday, Quark Inc. showed off QuarkXPress 7, which it characterized as "the most significant upgrade in the product's history."

In an hour-long demon­stra­tion to press, type design­ers, font tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ers, and graph­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sion­als Quark’s Gavin Drake, UK direc­tor of mar­ket­ing, and Scott Weiseler, the Quark prod­uct ana­lyst spear­head­ing Unicode and OpenType pro­gram­ming for XPress 7, demon­strat­ed the first sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments to XPress’s type engine since ver­sion 3.

Said Drake of XPress 7: It is “the biggest rewrite we’ve ever done, and the most sig­nif­i­cant upgrade we’ve ever done.” The core text engine has been rewrit­ten into com­part­men­tal­ized sec­tions that afford Quark devel­op­ers faster, sim­pler fea­ture addi­tions in 7 and later.

“By sup­port­ing Unicode and OpenType, QuarkXPress 7 will offer a con­sid­er­able increase in the range of typo­graph­i­cal options for our cus­tomers,” he continued.

New XPress 7 Typography Features Revealed:

• OpenType
  Including access to OpenType fonts entire table of more than 65,000 glyphs.
• Support for 23 OpenType Features
  Including: stan­dard lig­a­tures, dis­cre­tionary lig­a­tures, swash­es, frac­tions, super­script and sub­script, and alter­nate numer­al sets–tabular lin­ing, pro­por­tion­al old­style, pro­por­tion­al lin­ing, and tab­u­lar oldstyle.
• Font Fallback
  If a Unicode font does not include a full set of glyphs for non-Roman char­ac­ters, XPress 7 will “fall back” to a back-up font that does, sub­sti­tut­ing in the lay­out char­ac­ters from the first font with those in the sec­ond. This option will not be user-configurable in 7, but in future releas­es may allow users to spec­i­fy a list of fonts to fall back upon.
• Glyphs Palette
  Nearly iden­ti­cal to the Glyphs Palette in InDesign and Illustrator CS, and rumored to be stan­dard across all Adobe Creative Suite point prod­ucts in ver­sion 2.0, the QuarkXPress 7 Glyphs Palette will present a full tablu­lar view of any Unicode font’s (includ­ing OpenType’s) glyphs. Individual glyphs may be cho­sen from the cur­rent or alter­nate type­faces and insert­ed into the XPress layout.

  The Glyphs Palette will also fea­ture a pop-up menu for select­ing groups of relat­ed glyphs and the abil­i­ty to cre­ate a cus­tom set of often-used glyphs called “Favorites.”

• OpenType XPress Tags
  XPress Tags will be upgrad­ed to pre­serve and use OpenType fonts and fea­tures dur­ing import and export of tagged files.

What's Missing

Two typo­graph­i­cal fea­tures Quark users envy of InDesign that will not be in QuarkXPress 7 are hang­ing punc­tu­a­tion, which push­es punc­tu­a­tion like quo­ta­tion marks into the mar­gins and gut­ters of columns for improved read­abil­i­ty and opti­cal align­ment, and a multi-line com­pos­er. InDesign’s multi-line com­pos­er makes deci­sions about a para­graph’s word and char­ac­ter spac­ing, hyphen­ation, and word arrange­ment based upon the affect each action has on the entire para­graph, thus increas­ing read­abil­i­ty and reduc­ing dis­trac­tions like con­sec­u­tive hyphens, over­ly spread out words and char­ac­ters, and, most notably, rivers. Quark’s sin­gle line com­pos­er assem­bles lines of text in a para­graph with­out regard for what effect the assem­bly has on the lines above and below.

Passport Required?

With QuarkXPress 7 sup­port for Unicode and OpenType, the via­bil­i­ty of Quark Passport, the multi-language ver­sion of XPress is in doubt. Since Unicode is a double-byte for­mat, as are non-Roman lan­guage char­ac­ters like Japanese, Cyrillic, and Arabic, the sin­gle lan­guage ver­sion of XPress 7 will car­ry the same core lay­out language-support func­tion­al­i­ty as the cur­rent ver­sion of Passport. The only remain­ing dif­fer­ence between them will be the lan­guages avail­able to users in the interface–whether the palettes and dialogs dis­play labels in English, Russian, Dutch, or one of a dozen oth­er languages.

Whether Quark Passport con­tin­ues as a sep­a­rate prod­uct, and, if so, in what form, has yet to be decid­ed. Since the XPress code base will fea­ture the func­tion­al­i­ty of Passport, Drake fore­sees a uni­fi­ca­tion of the pro­grams’ code bases, which would make the future of Passport pure­ly a a mar­ket­ing deci­sion. “Do we sell just one pack­age, with sup­port for all lan­guages,” he said. Or “allow users to select which lan­guages they want, and sell them exact­ly that?” 

QuarkXPress 7, as first report­ed by Quark VS InDesign, is slat­ed to ship sum­mer 2005, though Drake would only con­firm a release date of “this year.”

[via Publish Magazine]