Quark Advances the Design Experience with QuarkXPress 8

PRESS RELEASE

DÜSSELDORF, Germany – 05-29-2008 Today Quark announced QuarkXPress® 8, the next major release of the indus­try stan­dard page-layout and design soft­ware that rev­o­lu­tion­ized pub­lish­ing more than 20 years ago. QuarkXPress 8 deliv­ers supe­ri­or design pow­er through a new, intu­itive inter­face devel­oped pur­pose­ful­ly for the cre­ation of high-end page lay­out; print, Web and Flash® author­ing tools; design-driven typog­ra­phy; and glob­al pub­lish­ing capa­bil­i­ties — all of which enable design­ers to push cre­ativ­i­ty to its lim­its with con­fi­dence and control. 

Enhanced Design Experience
QuarkXPress 8 offers users an enhanced design expe­ri­ence so they can work faster and smarter by quick­ly and eas­i­ly access­ing the tools they need. The new, intu­itive inter­face deliv­ers updates that allow for more design with few­er clicks. For example:

– Picture Content Tool: Allows users to grab, rotate, and scale images in real-time with­out typ­ing in num­bers or switch­ing from tool to tool.
– Item Tool and Text Content Tool: Smart behav­ior with­in these tools allows for less switch­ing between tools, even for rota­tion and man­ag­ing mul­ti­ple items.
– New Bézier Pen Tools: Draw illus­tra­tions direct­ly in QuarkXPress 8 with the rede­fined Bézier Pen tool.
– Workspace Enhancements: Include new but­tons for instant access to mas­ter pages and export­ing to PDF, EPS, SWF, and HTML— plus new split-view but­tons, enhanced con­tex­tu­al menus, and cus­tomiz­able active pasteboards.
– Measurements Palette: Further enhanced to make even more func­tions eas­i­ly acces­si­ble, includ­ing new click­able con­trols for on-the-fly drop-shadow modification.
– Drag-and-Drop: Drag text and pic­tures from the desk­top, Adobe® Bridge, iPhoto®, or any oth­er appli­ca­tion that sup­ports drag and drop. Alternatively, drag con­tent from QuarkXPress to Photoshop®, Illustrator®, Microsoft® Word, and oth­er appli­ca­tions for direct editing.

The new inter­face and design expe­ri­ence QuarkXPress 8 brings is already receiv­ing pos­i­tive reviews from indus­try experts. Analyst and con­sul­tant Andreas Pfeiffer is the author of many pro­duc­tiv­i­ty reports for the design and pub­lish­ing indus­try and spe­cial­izes in bench­mark­ing cre­ative soft­ware. He notes, “QuarkXPress 8 man­ages one of the most dif­fi­cult tasks in soft­ware devel­op­ment: to rethink the user inter­face to make it more effi­cient, more pro­duc­tive, and more enjoy­able, with­out alien­at­ing the expe­ri­enced user. The poten­tial pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains of the new release should be considerable.”

David Carson, world-renowned design­er who’s first book, The End of Print, is the top-selling graph­ic design book of all time, said, “In QuarkXPress 8 you can see Quark has real­ly paid atten­tion to how design­ers work. The new user inter­face is flu­id and unclut­tered, which is exact­ly the envi­ron­ment I like to design in. I love the new pic­ture box fea­tures that enable mouse-driven manip­u­la­tion of the images to scale, rotate and espe­cial­ly the live crop­ping pre­views. It means I no longer have to spend time switch­ing tools or typ­ing in num­bers and the new drag and drop capa­bil­i­ties should make work­ing between appli­ca­tions and my desk­top even easier.” 

Designer-driven Typography
QuarkXPress has always had a rep­u­ta­tion for pre­cise typo­graph­ic con­trol, and QuarkXPress 8 deliv­ers pow­er­ful and advanced text fea­tures in a way that puts even more con­trol in the hands of the design­er. It is the first page-layout appli­ca­tion to offer hang­ing char­ac­ters with paragraph-by-paragraph con­trol, mul­ti­ple and easy-to-use pre­sets, and the free­dom for users to cre­ate and share their own hang­ing char­ac­ter set­tings. QuarkXPress 8 also offers unprece­dent­ed con­trol over base­line grid set­tings, the abil­i­ty to apply unique grid set­tings to indi­vid­ual box­es, and a Grid Styles fea­ture that can keep even com­plex doc­u­ments consistent. 

Design Across Media
QuarkXPress 8 allows for syn­chro­nized and simul­ta­ne­ous design across print, Web, and Flash. Users can incor­po­rate sound, video, ani­ma­tion, and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty into their lay­outs through a built-in, designer-friendly inter­ac­tive lay­out tool that was pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able as Quark Interactive Designer. Without any pro­gram­ming skills, design­ers and cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als can share print con­tent on the Web and in Flash for­mat with­out pur­chas­ing mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions or learn­ing code. This func­tion­al­i­ty enables QuarkXPress users to cre­ate ful­ly inte­grat­ed print, Web, and Flash cam­paigns with shared images, text, styles, and more. 

Global Publishing
With QuarkXPress 8, one glob­al file for­mat sup­ports advanced east­ern and west­ern typog­ra­phy for more than 30 lan­guages. All edi­tions of QuarkXPress 8 share the same dic­tio­nar­ies, include hyphen­ation func­tion­al­i­ty, and sup­port the import, for­mat­ting, and out­put of East Asian text. American and European users can switch the lan­guage of their user inter­face to fit their needs and all users can open and print a file cre­at­ed in any edi­tion of QuarkXPress 8 with­out expe­ri­enc­ing reflow. 

The QuarkXPress 8 Plus Edition is built for users who require in-depth fea­tures for the for­mat­ting of East Asian text. The Plus Edition includes access to dozens of enhanced East Asian fea­tures, such as more than 20 addi­tion­al OpenType® font fea­tures, a user-friendly char­ac­ter spac­ing fea­ture, a true ideo­graph­ic grid with char­ac­ter count, and the abil­i­ty to apply grid styles that can be applied at the page and box level. 

Work Faster and Smarter
QuarkXPress 8 users will work faster and smarter with a range of updates to commonly-used fea­tures. This includes native Illustrator file import to com­ple­ment the exist­ing native Photoshop® sup­port, WYSIWYG font ren­der­ing, advanced guide man­age­ment with Guide Manager Pro, Item Styles to enable simul­ta­ne­ous con­trol of for­mat­ting for mul­ti­ple items, sup­port for import­ing PDF ver­sion 1.7 and ear­li­er, and Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG) based Output Styles and GWG-based Job Jackets® support. 

“QuarkXPress 8 demon­strates our under­stand­ing of the way design­ers work today, and under­scores Quark’s com­mit­ment to con­tin­u­al­ly pro­vid­ing inno­v­a­tive soft­ware that push­es the design expe­ri­ence forward,” said Tim Banister, General Manager of Desktop Technology for Quark. “We have com­bined high­ly intu­itive soft­ware with the design con­trol ele­ments that are crit­i­cal in the cre­ative process, and as a result believe QuarkXPress 8 will not only be a seam­less upgrade for exist­ing QuarkXPress users, but the most acces­si­ble pro­fes­sion­al page-layout soft­ware for new users to learn as well.”

Availability and Further Information
QuarkXPress 8 will be avail­able to pur­chase direct­ly from Quark and through Quark resellers world­wide with­in the next 60 days. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion on QuarkXPress 8 and the lat­est infor­ma­tion on avail­abil­i­ty, please vis­it 8.quark.com.

Purchase QuarkXPress 7 and Get QuarkXPress 8 Free
Users who pur­chase or upgrade to QuarkXPress 7 at reg­u­lar price between May 29, 2008, and August 1, 2008, are eli­gi­ble to upgrade to QuarkXPress 8 for free.* Additionally, any users who pur­chased upgrades to or full prod­ucts of QuarkXPress 7 between May 1, 2008, and May 29, 2008, are also be eli­gi­ble for a free* upgrade to QuarkXPress 8. 

* Terms and con­di­tions apply. See 8.quark.com/promos for fur­ther information. 

About Quark
Quark Inc. (www​.quark​.com) pro­vides desk­top pub­lish­ing and dynam­ic pub­lish­ing soft­ware that help cus­tomers design and pub­lish rich­ly designed com­mu­ni­ca­tions across a broad spec­trum of media. Two decades ago, our flag­ship prod­uct — QuarkXPress — changed the course of tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing. Today, not only does QuarkXPress con­tin­ue to inno­vate in the desk­top pub­lish­ing mar­ket — now Quark is rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing pub­lish­ing again with Quark® Dynamic Publishing Solution, help­ing cus­tomers cost-effectively meet enterprise-scale pub­lish­ing chal­lenges by extend­ing the ben­e­fits of advanced tech­nolo­gies across the pub­lish­ing process. Denver-based Quark Inc. is pri­vate­ly held.

8 thoughts on “Quark Advances the Design Experience with QuarkXPress 8”

  1. Good Thing in Colorado

    Cool! Good thing Quark is quit­ting desk­top. Your mis­in­for­ma­tion is mak­ing this site irrel­e­vant. Great reporting.

  2. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Perhaps you should read this “irrel­e­vant” site more exten­sive­ly, “Good Thing in Colorado.” Then you would be able to put infor­ma­tion in con­text rather than pick and choose which bits and pieces to string togeth­er into anony­mous and inco­her­ent derision.

    QuarkXPress 8 is exact­ly what I pre­dict­ed it would be in a September 2007 edi­to­r­i­al. Of par­tic­u­lar rel­e­vance is the fol­low­ing section:

    I don’t believe that Schiavone intends to take Quark down the same road he steered Arbortext, mov­ing ful­ly out of desk­top and into enter­prise. Eventually, yes, but not today. On the con­trary, I think Schiavone cares a great deal about desk­tops at this cru­cial stage in the game. He needs them. The desk­top is his gate­way to the enter­prise, and, just like Microsoft and Adobe before him, he needs desk­top soft­ware to sell and lever­age his new enter­prise products.

    I think QuarkXPress will con­tin­ue to have util­i­ty on its own, but its pri­ma­ry role will be to func­tion as a desk­top client for an as-yet unre­vealed enterprise-grade suite of systems.

    XPress 8 will be the first stage, I pre­dict. It will have few new fea­tures design­ers real­ly want, but will offer greater scal­a­bil­i­ty and automa­tion impor­tant to man­agers of large pub­lish­ing work­flows. …Schiavone knows that major pub­lish­ing work­flows don’t change rapid­ly. His real­is­tic goal for the XPress 8 gen­er­a­tion of prod­ucts will be to make the mar­ket take notice of Quark again, to open a dia­log with large work­flow man­agers who will help refine Schiavone’s vision for XPress 9.

    …By the time XPress 9 and its match­ing sys­tems do release…QuarkXPress will be lit­tle more than a client appli­ca­tion. All the real pow­er will reside on the server-side systems…

  3. Ad agency owner

    Hanging punc­tu­a­tion, and a bezi­er tool, eh? It took Quark long enough to fig­ure THOSE out, did­n’t it?

    Yawwwwwwwwwwwwwn.

  4. Editor X

    Saw the demo at Drupa – looks good! Does Quarkv/sID plan on eval­u­at­ing ver 8? There was a good review done by u on 7 – the Good Bad Ugly one…

    Would be great if you could do the same on this. Demos always look good, its the real review that i want to base my upgrade plan on.

  6. Quark8

    Indesign is great for Single page designs where you want a bit of flare.…but for books and any­thing that requires mul­ti­ple pages..forget it.

    I have used both in a range of jobs for quite some time, I find that Indesign likes to impress with its many pal­lets and clut­tered screens.

    Quark 8 is a real plea­sure to use and I don’t think for a moment that they will be gone any­time soon.

    peo­ple are quick to chuck imma­ture com­ments about quark about and build up Indesign into some­thing its not, but peo­ple do not release that out side the small design hous­es and self employed designers.

    I work in the pub­lish­ing indus­try and have for quite some time and still deal with a large vol­ume of Quark docs.

    Quark still has a strong foothold and will continue.

  7. Paul Chernoff

    Indesign is great for Single page designs where you want a bit of flare….but for books and any­thing that requires mul­ti­ple pages..forget it.

    Huh? We have been using InDesign for pub­lish­ing a month­ly mag­a­zine for 3 years and love it. We find the pan­els easy to deal with (CS3 great­ly improved their man­age­ment). And a lot of our work can be done from the keyboard.

  8. Jon Pastor

    Whoever said that Quark can be used for long doc­u­ments has clear­ly nev­er tried it. It is abominable.The “book” con­struct is flaky and dys­func­tion­al: if Quark crash­es – and it will, at least once in each ses­sion – you can lose all con­nec­tion between the “book” and the “chap­ters”.

    I just lost 4 hours of work when Quark 8 crashed. I had autosave every 5 min­utes set – I’m not stu­pid – but there was noth­ing, NOTHING, but a an a$v file from the START of my session.

    I can­not run Quark for more than an hour with­out hav­ing it crash at least once, and more often many times.

    I have to con­tin­ue using Quark until my cur­rent project is fin­ished; after that, I will nev­er touch it again. It’s total dis­as­ter. Version 8 is lit­tle, if any, bet­ter than the crash-prone V7 – but at least V7 usu­al­ly fol­lowed my direc­tions by doing back ups.

    If you are try­ing to decide between Quark and InDesign – I have been try­ing des­per­ate­ly to find a rea­son not to switch for a cou­ple of years now. I’ve run out of patience.

    Do your­self a favor and don’t touch Quark with a 20-foot pole.

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