QuarkXPress 7: Where's the Beef?

If you've been waiting on the edge of your seat, sit back.

After months of demos and “sneak peaks,” includ­ing fea­ture arti­cles in every issue of X‑Ray Magazine, the offi­cial mag­a­zine of QuarkXPress users, since Spring 2005, the pub­lic is ask­ing: “Where’s the beef?”

Originally expect­ed to release in Summer 2005, that time qui­et­ly came and went with naught but sneak pre­views of the high­ly antic­i­pat­ed XPress 7. Featuring an unprece­dent­ed color-level trans­paren­cy, mod­ern typo­graph­ic con­trols pur­port­ed­ly on par with InDesign CS2’s, and inte­grat­ed sup­port for indus­try stan­dard con­ven­tions such as as XML import and export, JDF Job Definition Format tick­et­ing, and vari­able data print­ing, XPress 7 is the most antic­i­pat­ed update to the QuarkXPress soft­ware since the 2003 release of ver­sion 6.0, which brought the ven­er­a­ble lay­out vet­er­an to the Mac OS X platform.

“My com­pa­ny needs more in the way of type con­trol and graph­ics han­dling than we can cur­rent­ly do in [QuarkXPress] 6.5,” says Richard Y., who asked that his firm not be iden­ti­fied. “InDesign is look­ing real­ly good to us. We’ve been loy­al Quark cus­tomers since ’91, and don’t want to switch. I’ve been watch­ing the news about [QuarkXPress] 7.0, but where is it? We wait­ed all sum­mer, now into autumn. We have needs now. Where is [QuarkXPress] 7? Where’s the beef?”

Confirming what our sources said last month, Quark announced at this past week­end’s MacExpo 2005 in London that QuarkXPress 7 is expect­ed to ship “ear­ly next year.” Apparently, the “beef,” which looks to be an incred­i­ble and feature-rich rebuild of the Nineties work­horse, won’t appear until some­time after the first of the year 2006.

If, like many QuarkXPress users, you’ve been fol­low­ing the blow-by-blow news on XPress 7 on Quark VS InDesign​.com, on the edge of your seat wait­ing for a release announce­ment, you can sit back now.