After a year of teasing, Quark today released XPress 7--as a beta.
Though still not ready for release, you can finally get your hands on QuarkXPress 7 by signing up for the public beta program. The beta, which will automatically expire after 31 March 2006, is available today as a 111 MB Windows download or 143 MB Mac download for QuarkXPress 7, QuarkXPress 7 International English version, and QuarkXPress Passport 7. After signing up, you will be e‑mailed with the location of teh downloads, and a password to access them.
Also released is the QuarkXPress 7 features list, which includes everything Quark has been leaking over the last twelve months, but no surprises. Transparency and OpenType will, of course, be supported, including background transparency for PSD files–a feature sorely missed in the QuarkVista 6.5 upgrade.
View the complete list of QuarkXPress 7 features or sign-up for the public beta program from the QuarkXPress 7 website.
(emphasis added)
If QXP 7 has moved to Unicode, then why is Passport still around? Something’s fishy here…
I have something I would like the editor to see. How can I write directly to you?
I agreed about Unicode and still Int’l English and Passport being around. I have decided that they will continue to charge for international versions because of hyphenation tables. So you can put German symbols into a regular Quark document, but hypenating German language copy is only happening in Passport.
zoomfactor still 800%, still that anoying pasteboard limitation…
the same old interface. WOW very impressive and exciting.
Jan Eskildsen said:
If Pariah hasn’t yet contacted you, contact him through the address on the Contact page here.
After several hours of struggling on Quark website to get download on a broadband connection I had to give up. If the company does not even care to distribute its downloads in a responsible fashion, I am certain about the quality of the product itself !!!!!!!!!!! crappy as always.
Still not as good as Indesign!!! but a nice try from Quark! I forsee this company loosing thousands of customers. This should have been
an indesign CS 2 Beater, but it doesnt even come close to Indesign CS. Quark should have improved its product years ago, way to late now in my opinion . Sorry Im sticking with Adobe!
Good work in almost all areas. This release is worth more than appreciation. I really wonder how Andy C compared it with ID, Xpress 7 is far better than ID in more areas than ID is better. The new UI makes the experience more wonderful. I appreciate the good work put in by Quark. I am eagrly waiting for Samuel and Pariah ‘s comment on this release.
Ah, pay a steeper price for hyphenation, while ID has hyphenation dictionaries for all its supported languages on any language version. Nice way to attract customers, Quark…
SAM, How can you say Quark 7 is better. Wheres the PSD support,
You can’t even open Indesign Documents either! Wheres the filters and effects. WOW I can drop shaddow now but I could do that years ago with Indesign. What about Outlining text! Forgotten that diddnt you Quark etc! I dont like the sloppy menus either still feels like an OS9 Package! As for Print production, Who cares any more with PDF Workflows in place. Most PDF workflows have there own imposition software! so theres no need for Quarks extra print options. Gone are the days of Film Spearation. all you need is Acrobat and Pitstop for the best PDF’s!! Get with the times Quark!!!
As for SAM I suggest that you learn Indesign, Properly!!!! Adobe are the BEST!!!
PSD support is not in the public beta but it will be better than Adobe’s offering in some ways. Of course, Adobe can raise the stakes by implementing better PSD import functionality in IDCS3.
And that is what you call competition.
The militant Quark/Adobe flaming seems odd. Even Adobe worshippers should hope that Quark does not fail in this release. We need competition or else we will all be stuck for sveral years with another stagnant industry standard. I’ve yet to be overwhelmed by QuarkXPress 7 but it is good to see that they are trying to stay in the game.
As for all of us, I suggest that we know both QuarkXPress and InDesign. A versatile designer is the BEST!!!
My experience with the Beta hasn’t been good. It is very slow. Importing Photoshop EPS files takes forever. I thought the program hung-up after 15 minutes. I was just getting ready to force quit when it came up. Writing PostScript takes over 15 minutes a page if you have transparency effects in them. I sincerely hope that this will be all optimized by the final product, because right now it is unusable in a print production workflow.
I have many print test with the public beta, mostly involving transparency. Althought it seems to be working well when applying them inside the application, it produce really bad output either when exported as PDF, or EPS or direct print. Stiching effect, mislaigned raster data region, downsampling or images, type clipping, even some opacity that does not output at all, vector art convert to raster, spot color convert to process and many many crash…
My generals feeling about it right now is that If their transparency flattener stay the way it is working in this public beta, Quark 7 shall be avoided completely if what you desires is accurate and trouble free output.
But this is a beta… so their is hope that various problems will be adressed before release. It’s a must! They will not have a second chance to do it right.
WOW!!! I am so buying this! It actually knows to put an icon in the dock! WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Those Adobe Bastards MAKE me put it in myself. What a jyp!
Oh…and it’s a 90’s retread, too.
Impressive!!!! Look at the measurement palette!! Great work !! i am happy to see Quark supporting transparency. But where is PSD Import xtension ? I hope it will be there in release and also with enhancements like transparency support. The JDF concept looks great but provided with a UI that is difficult to understand. May be this is new feature and we get more habitual after having our hands on it and will reduce a large amount of hassels during output. Vista looks good with improved performance(as we faced big performance issues in xpress 6.5 vista). Another great step is composition zones. I faced a few crashes while working with composition. I hope they get resolved on release.
With this release Quark turning layout designing into a more easy and manageable collaborative effort.
There are some performance issues but yes this is beta.
i ll post more of these comments as i get some more time to see QUarkXPress 7.0.
I just tried the Beta, and transformed a magazine page with shadows, transparency and so on. Looks quite promising, but on my 1.25gHz eMac it ran rather slow and jerky. I was never quite sure if the Mac was responding to my actions. It had to “think” about every task for a second or two.
Sadly, when I tried to open that page today, it crashed the software and so far is irretrievable. That problem reminds me of the reason I always use 1‑page documents in Quark – never an 80-page one for a whole magazine! Once you’ve lost an entire issue to a Quark corruption, you learn your lesson.
Alex, you seem to be using the beta version in your magazine. I tried it out as well. I dont know if you tried composition zones and job jackets. If not, i suggest you rope in your editorial group for CZ and your designers for JJ – its amazing how much faster you can create the magazine. The performance issues are being faced here as well, it is a little slow, but then i didnt expect a lot from this beta.