Quark Announces Some New Features That Will Be Available in QuarkXPress 7

XPress 7 to have job tickets, automation, transparency support and more

Press Release

Denver, Colo.–(QUARKvsINDESIGN.com)–May 17, 2005–Quark Inc. today announced that it will fur­ther its com­mit­ment to col­lab­o­ra­tion and inter­op­er­abil­i­ty by build­ing many pow­er­ful fea­tures of the QuarkXPress 7 soft­ware on open stan­dards. The pow­er­ful upgrade will com­bine more design fea­tures with job-driven work­flow capa­bil­i­ties and multi-channel pub­lish­ing to deliv­er sim­ply faster cre­ative devel­op­ment and print pro­duc­tion – trans­form­ing the busi­ness of cre­ative communications. 

As a mem­ber of the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG); the International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4); International Color Consortium (ICC); the Networked Graphic Production (NGP) ini­tia­tive; and the Print On Demand Initiative (PODi); Quark sup­ports stan­dards devel­oped with cus­tomers and oth­er ven­dors to serve the needs of cre­ative com­mu­ni­ca­tions industries.

Job-driven work­flow automation 
QuarkXPress 7 will pro­vide sim­ply faster pro­duc­tion, enabling cre­ative and out­put pro­fes­sion­als to define job para­me­ters that pro­vide cen­tral­ized con­trol and stream­line design, lay­out, and pro­duc­tion processes. 

Built on industry-standard JDF, QuarkXPress 7 will allow users to set spec­i­fi­ca­tions to con­trol a job from start to fin­ish using a Quark Job Jacket. A Quark Job Jacket will incor­po­rate detailed work­flow and pre­press infor­ma­tion direct­ly into a QuarkXPress project. This will help con­trol every aspect of the pub­li­ca­tion, from design to out­put and beyond. 

A Quark Job Jacket is a con­tain­er for all the spec­i­fi­ca­tions for an entire print pub­lish­ing process. It con­tains the infor­ma­tion about the job itself, con­tact infor­ma­tion, resources required, lay­out intent, rules, out­put spec­i­fi­ca­tions, and more. All the guide­lines, rules, and set­tings for all the process­es will be saved in the Quark Job Jacket to pre­vent errors dur­ing the pub­li­ca­tion’s cre­ation and out­put processes. 

Centralized job jack­ets will let art direc­tors, mar­ket­ing man­agers, and print ser­vice providers spec­i­fy para­me­ters for design, con­tent, pro­duc­tion and out­put – pro­vid­ing con­trol and con­sis­ten­cy from job ini­ti­a­tion to final pro­duc­tion. Changes in project spec­i­fi­ca­tions will be made to the job jack­et and will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly updat­ed to all projects that use the job jack­et as a resource. 

Quark Job Jacket ele­ments in QuarkXPress will be com­pat­i­ble with JDF ele­ments; they can be mapped to JDF ele­ments and vice ver­sa. JDF is an XML-based file for­mat that pro­vides con­trol over and automa­tion of print pub­lish­ing pro­duc­tion and stream­lines infor­ma­tion exchange between appli­ca­tions and systems. 

QuarkXPress 7 will also offer com­pre­hen­sive rule-based pre­flight capa­bil­i­ties to ensure that files are output-ready at any point in the design process. 

Further stream­lin­ing pro­duc­tion and elim­i­nat­ing dupli­cat­ed effort, QuarkXPress 7 will pro­vide instruc­tions that ensure that all the ele­ments need­ed for pro­duc­tion – fonts, col­ors, images, and more – are auto­mat­i­cal­ly embed­ded with the out­put file for right-the-first-time, every-time print­ing with PDF/X com­pli­ant output. 

Multi-channel pub­lish­ing and con­tent personalization 
QuarkXPress 7 will help con­tent cre­ators pub­lish mul­ti­ple print and Web lay­outs, quick­ly and reli­ably, from the same con­tent. Users will be able to cre­ate mul­ti­ple doc­u­ment types, sizes, and media; lever­age and reuse any con­tent, image or design ele­ment; stream­line devel­op­ment process­es through open stan­dards; and take advan­tage of one-to-one con­tent personalization. 

QuarkXPress 7 will allow cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als to design com­po­si­tions that can be merged with con­tent from dif­fer­ent sources and cre­ate out­put to send to press­es with min­i­mal pre­press pro­duc­tion costs. Support for out­put in Personalized Print Markup Language (PPML) will add data­base pub­lish­ing fea­tures to QuarkXPress 7. In PPML, all the sta­t­ic con­tent, mul­ti­ple instances of same sta­t­ic con­tent, syn­chro­nized con­tent, and mas­ter page ele­ments will be rec­og­nized as reusable objects, dras­ti­cal­ly improv­ing through­put time. 

The abil­i­ty to auto­mate data­base pub­lish­ing through industry-standard PPML sup­port will make QuarkXPress 7 the ide­al tool for cre­at­ing graph­i­cal­ly rich, per­son­al­ized com­mu­ni­ca­tions mate­ri­als based on vari­able data. 

More design features 
QuarkXPress 7 will pro­vide tools for sim­ply faster cre­ativ­i­ty, com­bin­ing the lat­est design fea­tures in an intu­itive, standards-compliant prod­uct. The release will have new and enhanced fea­tures to con­trol trans­paren­cy, images, and col­ors; and to accu­rate­ly visu­al­ize graph­ics and work with OpenType fonts. 

With new trans­paren­cy fea­tures to be includ­ed in QuarkXPress 7, users will be able to spec­i­fy the opac­i­ty of the ele­ments that make up any items or con­tent in QuarkXPress – text, pic­tures, blends, box­es, frames, lines, tables, and more. QuarkXPress 7 will have greater con­trol over trans­paren­cy than oth­er appli­ca­tions by man­ag­ing opac­i­ty lev­els for any col­or ele­ment of an object rather than on an object-by-object basis. The trans­paren­cy fea­tures will also enable the cre­ation of dynam­ic, soft drop shad­ows, as well as the abil­i­ty to mask pic­tures with soft edges using alpha chan­nels – includ­ing native Photoshop trans­paren­cy in PSD or TIFF format. 

To enhance col­or man­age­ment in QuarkXPress, new con­trols will improve on-screen sim­u­la­tions for soft proof­ing. For exam­ple, users will be able to pre­view how RGB prints to CMYK on-screen or how CMYK prints in grayscale. Creative pro­fes­sion­als will be able to man­age their source col­ors and out­put spec­i­fi­ca­tions with­in the QuarkXPress soft­ware. Quark will make col­or man­age­ment sim­ple so more users will be like­ly to embrace it and start ben­e­fit­ing from soft proofing. 

QuarkXPress 7 will expand its access to spe­cial char­ac­ters through Unicode sup­port, OpenType sup­port, and inter­face improve­ments that make it easy to insert spe­cial char­ac­ters with­out look­ing up key­board com­mands or resort­ing to third-party soft­ware. The release will offer full sup­port for the mul­ti­tude of char­ac­ters and typo­graph­ic fea­tures built into OpenType fonts, includ­ing spe­cial char­ac­ters and fonts required by dif­fer­ent languages. 

Open file format 
Quark has also opened the QuarkXPress project by cre­at­ing QuarkXPress Markup Language (QXML), a DOM schema for QuarkXPress projects. The struc­ture of the QuarkXPress project is defined accord­ing to W3C DOM and XPath spec­i­fi­ca­tions so that devel­op­ers can eas­i­ly access, update, and cre­ate QuarkXPress project elements. 

DOM makes all the con­tent of a QuarkXPress project avail­able as XML, which allows any appli­ca­tion that under­stands the schema of a QuarkXPress project to access the QuarkXPress data and process it; it is a live rep­re­sen­ta­tion of QuarkXPress projects as XML. 

About Quark
Quark Inc. (www​.quark​.com) is a lead­ing devel­op­er of tools and tech­nolo­gies for col­lab­o­ra­tive con­tent work­flows from the desk­top to the enter­prise. Quark has been pro­vid­ing award-winning soft­ware for pro­fes­sion­al pub­lish­ers since its flag­ship prod­uct QuarkXPress changed the course of tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing. Today, as Quark soft­ware is used by mil­lions of cus­tomers around the world, the com­pa­ny is guid­ing the cre­ation of vital open stan­dards to pro­mote pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and inter­op­er­abil­i­ty through­out the indus­try. With a new gen­er­a­tion of prod­ucts and solu­tions, Quark is help­ing its cus­tomers cre­ate, man­age, per­son­al­ize, and dis­trib­ute con­tent to a vari­ety of media for­mats and devices at low cost. Founded in 1981, Denver-based Quark Inc. is pri­vate­ly held.

9 thoughts on “Quark Announces Some New Features That Will Be Available in QuarkXPress 7”

  1. Janes Mann

    that’s sound real­ly exct­ing.. JobJacket.. hmmmm

  2. Robert louse

    I haven’t gone through the whole arti­cle, but i am preety sure we guys are in for a rev­o­lu­tion.…. No soft­ware in pub­lish­ing domain is boast up of Job Management fea­ture… Quark is real­ly keep­ing up with the promise… Keep up the good work.. Free Customer sup­port, Dual licens­ing pol­i­cy, Interesting fea­ture set.….. Welcome back Quark.

  3. Lisa collery

    I was about to buy CS2 but this announce­ment real­ly made me wait­tt.. This fea­ture set real­ly seems inter­est­ing.. i have been on XPress for the last 7 years.… cur­rent­ly, think­ing of upgrad­ing to MacOS X… I had a choice between XPress 6.5 & Indesign.. but with 7.0 in store with some of inter­est­ing fea­tures.… & if quark keep doing a good job on cus­tomer sup­port front.… i’ll definetl­ty think for get­ting back to XPress ways.… Welocome back Quark 

  4. Pariah S. Burke

    NOTICE From Editor:

    All three of the above com­ments are from the same IP address and sent with­in min­utes of each other.

  5. Samuel John Klein

    Nice to see three out of the Four Quarksters of the Apocalypse show up. It took you a day to reply. Why so long? B-)

    Some good-natured mock­ery to fol­low. Please make a note of it!

    Janes Mann:

    that’s sound real­ly exct­ing.. JobJacket.. hmmmm

    So very lacon­ic so sud­den­ly. Better watch out; some­one’ll turn a hose on you. Your unbri­dled enthu­si­asm could very well lead to dancing.

    Robert Iouse (if that’s your real name):

    I haven’t gone through the whole arti­cle, but i am preety sure we guys are in for a rev­o­lu­tion….. No soft­ware in pub­lish­ing domain is boast up of Job Management fea­ture… Quark is real­ly keep­ing up with the promise… Keep up the good work.. Free Customer sup­port, Dual licens­ing pol­i­cy, Interesting fea­ture set…… Welcome back Quark.

    Whooh-talk of rev­o­lu­tion again…I feel faint. Always get my vapors when they talk of sedition. 

    Anyway.

    “Job Management” is indeed an inter­est­ing con­cept. Not unheard of, but inter­est­ing. I get the idea that automat­ing the Job Jacket con­cept could indeed facil­i­tate bet­ter workflow‑I don’t real­ly see why it should­n’t. Of course, the Quark-only work­flow has the advan­tage of it.

    So, the ques­tion again-will it be good enough to return con­vert­ed InDesigners to the Quark fold? Depends on how they imple­ment it. 

    Lisa Collery:

    I was about to buy CS2 but this announce­ment real­ly made me wait­tt.. This fea­ture set real­ly seems inter­est­ing.. i have been on XPress for the last 7 years…. cur­rent­ly, think­ing of upgrad­ing to MacOS X… I had a choice between XPress 6.5 & Indesign.. but with 7.0 in store with some of inter­est­ing fea­tures…. & if quark keep doing a good job on cus­tomer sup­port fron­t…. i’ll definetl­ty think for get­ting back to XPress ways…. Welocome back Quark

    First things first, Lisa. Upgrade to OS X. Don’t wait any­more. There’s no real rea­son not to. If you’re still on XPress V5.anything, It’ll run in clas­sic envi­ron­ment. You can have your Quark and Panther (or Tiger, if you will). 

    If you want to wait for V7, no sin there. Lots of work­flows, or so I am told, still run on V4.whatever. I think you’re miss­ing out if you can upgrade to V6.5 but don’t. Actually, if you are in a posi­tion to and it’s prac­ti­cal to do so, I would sug­gest you mount both. It seems to be a time of change in lay­out, and I would humbly put for­ward that the bet­ter lay­out artists will be the bilin­gual ones.

    In all, this is the kind of word I was hop­ing for from the Four Quarksters. Nice to see some­one putting thi­er mon­ey where their mouths are.

    One by one, then:

    Job Jackets: Like I said, the proof for this one will be in the pud­ding. I wait to see how it is imple­ment­ed. It will be there, but will it be usable? Will it be good enough to make me think of using Quark instead of InDesign? It’s get­ting much less dif­fi­cult to find ser­vice bureaux late­ly who serve InDesigners…locally, Oregon Lithoprint in Eugene and Revere Press in Portland accept .indd files with­out com­plaint. Will “Job Jackets” be a bet­ter bet than sim­ple, clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion with your ser­vice bureau?

    Multi-channel Publication
    Having what expe­ri­ence I have near­ly com­plete­ly in print I can under­stand the abil­i­ty to repur­pose assets as a con­cept but don’t have enough expe­ri­ence with it to com­pe­tent­ly com­ment on the nuts and bolts of it. However, in view of Adobe’s acqui­si­tion of Macromedia and where it puts Adobe as a mul­ti­me­dia con­tent tool forg­er, it can’t be too bad a move. I’ve nev­er found Quark’s web toolk­it par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pelling, though.

    More design features…
    It’s nice to hear that Quark is going to make trans­paren­cy inte­gral to the pro­gram. It’s also nice to see that Quark is look­ing to make the inter­face more intuitive…once again, I think the inter­face is going to be a key bat­tle­field and Quark has been very coy about how it’s going about mov­ing in there. 

    The idea of soft, on-screen proof­ing is, as far as I know, some­thing of a Holy Grail. It can be very good if you have a prop­er­ly cal­i­brat­ed mon­i­tor, but still nev­er guar­an­tee­able. And, it’s been avail­able in InDesign for quite a while. 

    OpenType and Unicode support…Good on Quark, but over due. And InDesign has already done it.

    With the excep­tion of the elec­tron­ic Job Jacket, the goal still seems to be fea­ture par­i­ty. For those who like this sort of thing, this should be just the sort of thing they like.

  6. marco

    I would not be spurised to see some ” InDesign and JDF-news” pop up after this Quark news. 

  7. Pariah S. Burke

    Setting up JDF out­side of InDesign (and Quark) has been around for a while via third-party software.

    Having it with­in Quark will make a work­flow one-step more efficient–I’m not belit­tling that, mind you. Saving any step, espe­cial­ly one that involves a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tion, is poten­tial­ly a sig­nif­i­cant pro­duc­tiv­i­ty improve­ment to work­flows requir­ing that func­tion­al­i­ty. I’m all for the abil­i­ty to spec­i­fy JDF wrap­pers with­in the lay­out app instead of exter­nal to it.

    Cheers for Quark for inno­vat­ing! As I’ve always said, the only way for QuarkXPress to remain a viable prod­uct in the mar­ket is through innovation.

    My only reser­va­tion about this is the fact that XPress 6.x PDF files are unpre­dictable and often flawed. As a pro­fes­sion­al Quark instruc­tor, work­flow con­sul­tant, user, and jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing, I see many XPress-generated PDFs that are unprint­able and unview­able (not only in Acrobat, but also in OS X Preview and even Jaws’ own view­er). Most XPress 6.x users, in my expe­ri­ence, still have to print to Distiller or do the two-step PDF gen­er­a­tion method. Hopefully the addi­tion of JDF func­tion­al­i­ty means Quark is fix­ing its imple­men­ta­tion of the Jaws PDF engine.

  8. Pariah S. Burke

    QuarkXPress 7 will have greater con­trol over trans­paren­cy than oth­er appli­ca­tions by man­ag­ing opac­i­ty lev­els for any col­or ele­ment of an object rather than on an object-by-object basis.

    Now this is inno­v­a­tive. As I read it, one will be able to spec­i­fy a sin­gle col­or in a full-color object to be semi-transparent or blend a cer­tain way–currently only avail­able by edit­ing the source image in Pshop or Illustrator. So, for exam­ple, using the infa­mous Ducky.tif Photoshop sam­ple file, instead of futz­ing with clip­ping set­tings, the white back­ground could be removed by ren­der­ing the col­or white trans­par­ent. At the same time, Ducky’s yel­low body could be set to a blend­ing mode–hard light, maybe–while retain­ing non-blended, non-transparency on the red beak and black eyes.

    Intereesting. I’m quite curi­ous to see this in action.

  9. Pingback: Quark VS InDesign » Quark 7.0: Latest Peek Unsexy, But Strong

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