QuarkXPress 6.5: Revolutionary... Or Desperate?

Last week Quark released QuarkXPress 6.5, a hint, an inti­ma­tion, per­haps even a promise, of where Quark 7 may take us next year. The 6.5 upgrade, avail­able free of charge to all reg­is­tered Quark 6 users, has new fea­tures, though none of them insur­gent. Not in today’s desk­top pub­lish­ing dom­i­nat­ed by the agile, feature-packed InDesign. For Quark, how­ev­er, the new fea­tures are some­thing to behold.

• QuarkVista, a new Xtension pro­vid­ing basic image edit­ing func­tion­al­i­ty from with­in Quark. Features include adjust­ing col­or bal­ance, lev­els, bright­ness, con­trast and effects fil­ters. Additionally, like InDesign and Illustrator, effects are non-destructive and can be edit­ed or removed at any time.
• Native import of Photoshop files, which actu­al­ly trumps InDesign’s sup­port for Adobe’s own PSD file for­mat. Unlike InDesign, which treats placed PSDs as a sol­id, flat­tened image with­out affect­ing the con­tent of the image, QuarkXPress 6.5 actu­al­ly grants access to the lay­ers of a multi-layer PSD, includ­ing turn­ing them on and off just like with­in Photoshop itself. Moreover, lay­er opac­i­ty and blend­ing mode can be changed, chan­nels can be assigned to print as spot col­ors, and clip­ping paths can be selected–all from with­in Quark. The secret is ALAP’s PSD Import plu­g­in, once avail­able as a stand­alone third-party plu­g­in, ful­ly inte­grat­ed into XPress 6.5.

  Note: The PSD import fea­ture isn’t yet avail­able for Quark 6.5. ALAP has­n’t yet final­ized its devel­op­ment. Quark expects to make it avail­able in the first quar­ter of 2005.

• For OS X Quark users who out­put to HP Indigo press­es, 6.5 includes an upgrade to the vari­able data pub­lish­ing Xtension, QuarkXClusive. The new ver­sion adds sup­port for PPML‑T, increas­ing com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with mod­els of the HP Indigo dig­i­tal press.

• In response to the grow­ing use of enterprise-level deploy­ment sofware, which enables run­ning of appli­ca­tions installed on a serv­er across the net­work on stan­dard or even non-harddrive client sys­tems, 6.5 and Quark License Administrator have been opti­mized for Citrix Metaframe, the most pop­u­lar deploy­ment system.
• The abil­i­ty to group tables with, and like, any oth­er object has been added to 6.5.
• OPI and bleed can now be set in print styles using cert­ian Xtensions.
• Quark claims the over­all reli­a­bil­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty of QuarkXPress has been “improved” with 6.5
• Cross-promotion value-adding is also a big part of 6.5, with pro­fes­sion­al­ly design lay­out tem­plates from Stock Layouts, demo ver­sions of Creo Token and Insider Font Agent Pro, and a non-charge, down­load­able bun­dle of Linotype fonts.
• Users can now place guides on a mas­ter pages’s paste­board and they auto­mat­i­cal­ly appear on doc­u­ment pages.

Exciting as they are, more inter­est­ing than the fea­tures them­selves is the fact that they are wrapped in a free half-step update rather than in a full ver­sion upgrade for which Quark can–and would previously–charge.

Is this the kinder, more customer-focused Quark real­iz­ing that past prac­tices of nickel-and-diming cus­tomers isn’t the path to inspir­ing loy­al­ty? Or is this a ner­vous Quark des­per­ate­ly play­ing catch up with InDesign’s fea­tures to slow the hemor­rag­ing of XPress’s user base?

If the intent was to pol­ish the rust­ed brand image of Quark, none of the new 6.5 fea­tures will do that. Quark has­n’t inno­vat­ed any­thing. The great­est fea­ture of the update is the native Photoshop PSD import and manip­u­la­tion func­tions, which Quark did­n’t cre­ate; ALAP did. Following close­ly on the heels of PSD import is QuarkVista, a vir­tu­al mir­ror of InDesign’s native fea­tures and anoth­er ALAP plug-in,InEffects for InDesign.

So the two great­est mar­ket­ing points of 6.5 are some­one else’s work. The rest are no-brainer tweaks that should have been in Quark years ago and minor enhance­ments, often build­ing off some­one else’s tech­nol­o­gy, as in the case of the XClusive Xtension to make use of HP’s Indigo work­flow. Partnership and licens­ing from ALAP, Linotype, and oth­ers, is not innovation.

But then, inno­va­tion isn’t a word most QuarkXPress users have asso­ci­at­ed with the Denver-based com­pa­ny in a very long time–unless you count erect­ing a city in its own name.

Most long-time Quark users would charge that Quark has­n’t inno­vat­ed since the intro­duc­tion of QuarkImmedia, the suite of xten­sions for mul­ti­me­dia export of Quark doc­u­ments, orig­i­nal­ly released in the mid-90s. Features like the new tables tool (intro­duced in Quark 5) and mul­ti­ple lay­outs in a sin­gle doc­u­ment are exam­ples of Quark ingenuity.

But tables was­n’t an idea thought up by Quark, it was a fea­ture added to catch up with table fea­tures already present in InDesign, and, as part of a sep­a­rate bun­dled appli­ca­tion, in PageMaker for ten years. Creating mul­ti­ple layouts–complete with dif­fer­ent page dimen­sions, lay­ers, and content–for print and/or Web use, and the abil­i­ty to sychro­nize text between them was indeed high­ly inge­nious, and Quark should be com­mend­ed for its efforts here. But, does this one fea­ture jus­ti­fy the expense of a new copy of XPress?

Ever since win­ning the first Desktop Publishing War against Aldus’s PageMaker in the ear­ly 90s, Quark has been stag­nant. Bug fix­es are few and far between–some decade old bugs have yet to be fixed–and remark­able or even high­ly use­ful new fea­tures are even scarcer.

Quark 7, ten­ta­tive­ly due Summer 2005, is rumored to be called inside Quark HQ “the InDesign Killer,” in ref­er­ence to the medi­a’s moniker for InDesign, “the Quark Killer.” So far the news leaked about the expect­ed fea­ture set of 7, how­ev­er, still bears no stamp of inno­va­tion. Competitive seems to be the oper­a­tive phrase around the Quark devel­op­ment camps in Denver and India.

Allegedly tar­get­ting fea­ture par­i­ty with InDesign, 7 may not intro­duce any­thing inno­v­a­tive at all–especially if Adobe holds to its intend­ed Creative Suite release sched­ule. If so, InDesign 4 should pre­cede Quark 7 by two or three months, which would ren­der Quark 7’s fea­ture par­i­ty with InDesign 3 (CS) moot.

If Quark’s goal is indeed to play catch up with InDesign’s inno­va­tion, the once king of the dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing world will find itself rel­e­gat­ed to the dread­ed “alter­na­tive choice” cir­cle beside Ottawa-based Corel.

With the excep­tion of Painter, a nat­ur­al media graph­ics appli­ca­tion it acquired as part of the pur­chase of Kai Krause’s Metacreations, Corel’s entire sta­ble of cre­ative and office pro­grams have always been low-market share second-stringers. From WordPerfect, which has at last count a 7% installed mar­ket share against Microsoft Word’s 92%, to PhotoPaint, a strong and swift anchor run­ning always one lap behind industry-standard image edi­tor Adobe Photoshop, Corel is con­stant­ly play­ing fea­ture catchup with the big boys.

If Quark is going to play the same game with InDesign in hopes of retain­ing users who would rather wait 12–18 months for fea­tures than learn a new pro­gram, it will be in friend­ly com­pa­ny. But odds are it won’t last too long with that strat­e­gy. It near­ly did in Corel, and Corel has a whole selec­tion of appli­ca­tions for dif­fer­ent work­flows; Quark is a one-trick pony.