LEAKED! Creative Suite 3, InDesign CS3, QuarkXPress 7 Features

Online survey leaks surprising product line up of Creative Suite 3 and potential new features of InDesign CS3 and QuarkXPress 7.

As part of an online sur­vey ini­ti­at­ed just a few hours ago by AbsolutData Research & Analytics on behalf of an unnamed “major soft­ware com­pa­ny,” sur­vey par­tic­i­pants were asked to make judg­ments about their like­li­hood of buy­ing “much improved” prod­ucts. These “next gen­er­a­tion” prod­ucts are iden­ti­fied as QuarkXPress 7, InDesign CS3, and the Adobe Creative Suite 3–complete with a detailed list of prod­uct fea­tures and the Creative Suite lineup.

QuarkXPress 7 Features?

According to the sur­vey, the “much improved new ver­sion (QuarkXPress),” which is lat­er ref­er­enced as QuarkXPress 7, will con­tain the fol­low­ing list of new fea­tures. Enough of these fea­tures have been demon­strat­ed by Quark and X‑Ray Magazine over the last eight months of XPress 7 hype that our con­fi­dence is high the list is an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of XPress 7’s ship­ping fea­ture set. The infor­ma­tion is pub­lished here ver­ba­tim, with­out edit­ing, to enable you to draw your own con­clu­sions about its veracity.

    CREATIVITY

    QuarkXPress 4. 5 and 6 sup­port for­mats like TIF and EPS, as well as over­prints and multi-ink col­ors. QuarkXPress 7 intro­duces pre­cise trans­paren­cy con­trols, drop shad­ows, alpha chan­nel sup­port, and sup­port for Photoshop PSD lay­er opacity.

    Built-in image engine, first intro­duced in ver­sion 6.5, reduces time spent on image manip­u­la­tion. In QuarkXPress 7 new graph­ics for­mats are sup­port­ed and alpha chan­nels can be softened.

    Streamlined inter­face allows major­i­ty of com­mon tasks to be con­trolled from a sin­gle palette. Users will be able to use the func­tion­al­i­ty of the main QuarkXPress 4 dia­log box­es while max­i­miz­ing screen real estate.

    Cross-platform OpenType typog­ra­phy and Unicode inter­na­tion­al char­ac­ter support. 

    LAYOUT AND COLLABORATION

    Where QuarkXPress ver­sions 4, 5 and 6 allow for sim­ple, sta­t­ic con­tent man­age­ment via Libraries, in QuarkXPress 7 users can cre­at­ed lay­out blocks that can be edit­ed in one place with real time updates in mul­ti­ple pages, files or even among mul­ti­ple users.

    QuarkXPress 4, 5 and 6 and oth­er lay­out appli­ca­tions allow lay­outs to be divid­ed only by split­ting up a file, and indi­vid­ual pages can?t be divid­ed at all. In QuarkXPress 7, com­plex lay­outs and even pages can be flex­i­bly shared among mul­ti­ple users for simul­ta­ne­ous collaboration.

    Building on the text syn­chro­niza­tion of QuarkXPress 6.5, users of QuarkXPress 7 can flex­i­bly syn­chro­nize images, text, lay­out and styles across mul­ti­ple lay­outs and media types. Users can change once, and update everywhere.

    PREDICTABLE RESULTS

    Where QuarkXPress 4 and 5 require third-party appli­ca­tions to cre­ate PDF files, QuarkXPress 6 and 7 allows users to cre­ate PDF files direct­ly from QuarkXPress. In QuarkXPress 7, native PDF and PDF/X sup­port users have bet­ter con­trol of their final out­put via native PDF and PDF/X sup­port and through cus­tomiz­able pre-flighting.

    QuarkXPress 4, 5 and 6 use the Quark CMS XTensions soft­ware to apply col­or man­age­ment on a file-by-file basis. Color man­age­ment in QuarkXPress 7 is always-on, auto­mat­i­cal­ly picks up sys­tem set­tings and can be eas­i­ly shared and stan­dard­ized, allow­ing bet­ter on-screen soft proof­ing. Advanced Color Management users will find many new options.

    Production and design set­tings can be stan­dard­ized with print­ers or across a work­group with real-time updates

    Robust graph­ics engine pro­vides improved anti-aliasing and image previews.

    MULTI-CHANNEL PUBLISHING

    QuarkXPress 4 is focused entire­ly on print: in QuarkXPress 7, the Web Layout envi­ron­ment allows direct HTML export, image export and Flash import.

InDesign CS3 Features?

According to the sur­vey, the “much improved new ver­sion (InDesign),” which is also lat­er iden­ti­fied specif­i­cal­ly as InDesign CS3, will con­tain the fol­low­ing list of new fea­tures. The infor­ma­tion is pub­lished here ver­ba­tim, with­out edit­ing, to enable you to draw your own con­clu­sions about its veracity.

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16 thoughts on “LEAKED! Creative Suite 3, InDesign CS3, QuarkXPress 7 Features”

  1. Sara Froehlich

    If there is a Premium Edition of the CS3 Suite that includes Dreamweaver, that’s for me. As a user of both, and as an author of GoLive tuto­ri­als and a Dreamweaver course, I pre­fer Dreamweaver. I have had numer­ous crash­es with GoLive and find Dreeamweaver more intu­itive. I was hop­ing that Dreaweaver would get the PDF capa­bil­i­ties of GoLive..maybe that will hap­pen any­way. At any rate this was a very intrugu­ing arti­cle and it will be very inter­est­ing to see what comes to fruition!

  2. Brian Cupp

    I asked the com­pa­ny “Absolute Data Research & Analytics” where they got my email address from . They respond­ed say­ing they recieved it from Adobe.

  3. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Very inter­est­ing, Brian. 

    What’s even more inter­est­ing is that anoth­er per­son whom I trust told me that the e‑mail address at which he received the sur­vey invi­ta­tion is used sole­ly for cor­re­spon­dence with Quark, that he has nev­er giv­en it to any­one else.

    I real­ly wish Quark would return my calls or e‑mails about this. Adobe says they aren’t behind it, but Quark has yet to comment.

    If you look at Absolut Data’s clients, nei­ther Quark nor Adobe is list­ed… But anoth­er indus­try play­er is.

    If you take the sur­vey, it is very much about QuarkXPress and var­i­ous add-on mod­ules for XPress. Of course, no one will own up to pay­ing for the survey.

  4. ExQuarkian

    I think every­one should prob­a­bly know that QuarkXpress 7 will NOT have any flash import func­tion­al­i­ty. I would be sur­prised if it even man­ages flash out­put in ver­sion 7.

  5. Brady J. Frey

    Should they real­ly han­dle flash any­how, though? GoLive is junk, but Dreamweaver is a less­er evil in the end – nei­ther appli­ca­tion is made for high end web devel­op­ment. They bun­dle it with BBEdit capa­bil­i­ties, we may talk further…

  6. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Should it han­dle Flash…? Yes and no. I can see a real need for export­ing FlashPaper from XPress–FlashPaper is becom­ing anoth­er form of output–but not for Flash ani­ma­tions et al for Web use.

    GoLive and DreamWeaver… I’ve played with both, but have nev­er been able to get into any WYSIWYG HTML edi­tor. I began design­ing and deploy­ing pro­fes­sion­al Websites back in late ’94 when WYSIWYGs were use­less. Now, ten years lat­er, I just can’t break the habit of writ­ing code by hand. I comp and lay­out site tem­plates in Illustrator, slice and export, then imme­di­ate­ly rewrite the XHTML and CSS code in TopStyle, HomeSite, or BBEdit.

  7. Brady J. Frey

    I for­got about flash­pa­per, I can see the use for web abil­i­ties in there.

    I’d agree with you on the cod­ing por­tion – my expe­ri­ence with dreamweaver is it takes me just as much time to fix what it out­puts as it would to code it right in the first place.

  8. Dean Wares

    It seems to me that the whole cod­ing process has been done in a very hap­haz­ard and lazy fash­ion. I can only assume that it was cod­ed by a hack who seems to have jumped on the whole flash band­wag­on. Or maybe some­one who real­ly isn’t very focused and pas­sion­ate about the indus­try we work in.

  9. Lee Sargent

    Maybe he should spend more time at his desk learn­ing the art of cod­ing instead of treat­ing the office as a youth club.

  10. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Dean and Lee:

    Admittedly, I’m still work­ing on my first cup of cof­fee, but… What–or who–are you talk­ing about?

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  13. Samuel John Klein

    “indi­ka”:

    please send me quark 7

    Well, no can do there. But Quark has a pub­lic beta pro­gram cur­rent­ly under­way that allows you to down­load a prac­tial­ly ful­ly func­tion­al beta to do what­ev­er you want to it. It’s a free down­load, but expires at the end of March.

    You can find it here:
    http://​www​.quark​.com/​p​r​o​d​u​c​t​s​/​x​p​r​e​s​s​/​s​e​v​e​n​/​b​e​t​a.html

    Good luck!

  14. Neelesh Singh

    I Personally think this was the sur­vey from Quark behalf as my friends name was there in the quark list. I think it is quite not fair on behalf of Quark to share his email address with a third par­ty ven­dor. Also the way the sur­vey was made about the fea­tures of theQuarkexp 7 shows that info may most proabably would have com from quark.

  15. Kevin Jones

    I know some­one who says that Creative Suite 3 is com­ing out in 1 week, My source is extreme­ly reliable…

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