QuarkXPress 7: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The com­plete set of glyphs in any installed type­face and style can be viewed in its entire­ty. When the viewed font is an OpenType with extra embed­ded fea­tures, sub­sets become avail­able, includ­ing: small cap­i­tals, dis­cre­tionary lig­a­tures, his­tor­i­cal forms, lin­ing fig­ures, styl­is­tic alter­nates, swash, or any­thing else defined in the font. Loading Adobe’s Minion Pro Med OpenType into the Glyphs palette, for exam­ple, will yield 19 indi­vid­u­al­ly view­able glyph sub­sets. XPress’s Glyphs palette also includes pop-ups of glyph vari­a­tions includ­ed in some OpenType fonts–for instance, all the dif­fer­ent ver­sions of a low­er­case a, all com­piled onto the fly­out menu acces­si­ble by click­ing and hold­ing on any one a. If it’s in your font, the Glyphs palette makes it easy to access. Once found, double-clicking any glyph inserts into the cur­rent text box at the cur­sor position.

XPress also uses the Glyphs palette in an inter­est­ing new way. Instead of plac­ing com­mands to insert sym­bol, space, and break char­ac­ters on a menu or leav­ing it up the user to find glyphs (many of which are effec­tive­ly invis­i­ble) inside indi­vid­ual fonts, the Glyphs palette includes a cou­ple of glob­al glyph sets. Loading one such set gives instant access to com­mon­ly used type marks and sym­bols such as the trade­mark, reg­is­tered trade­mark, copy­right, and dag­ger sym­bols, as well as the mid­dle dot bul­let, ellip­sis, and em and en dash­es (if present in the font). Other glob­al glyph sets assign visu­al indi­ca­tors or icons to such things as break­ing and non-breaking ver­sions of a hair space, 6‑per-em-space, em space, flex­i­ble space, and indent here, dis­cre­tionary hyphen, and dis­cre­tionary new line mark­ers. Placing these items on the Glyphs palette is a fan­tas­tic idea and incred­i­bly con­ve­nient, although I do wish XPress also allowed the user to assign key­board short­cuts to the most com­mon sym­bols, spaces, and breaks. Fortunately, you can man­u­al­ly find glyphs you use often just once, and then add them to the Favorite Glyphs area, which is hand­i­ly always in view at the bot­tom of the palette.

The spe­cial break­ing and non-breaking spaces and mark­ers are extreme­ly use­ful, but the list is far from exhaus­tive. Missing are the usu­al com­ple­ment of story-level breaks, such as col­umn, page, and odd- and even-pages, and layout-level dynam­ic char­ac­ters like page num­ber, next page num­ber, and pre­vi­ous page num­ber. The last three are in XPress, but buried on the new Utilities > Insert Character menu. All of the oth­er spe­cial char­ac­ters and spaces on the menu are in the Glyphs palette, mak­ing it much more like­ly users will forget–or nev­er find–the menu.

Font Fallback
Font Fallback, cur­rent­ly includ­ed in 6.5 but large­ly ignored, is enabled by default in 7. Font Fallback is XPress’s method of deal­ing with miss­ing glyphs. For exam­ple, with­out Font Fallback, import­ing or past­ing copy that uses glyphs not present in the cur­rent font will beget famil­iar emp­ty box­es. With Font Fallback enabled, how­ev­er, XPress search­es for an active font that does con­tain those glyphs, auto­mat­i­cal­ly replac­ing the white box­es. How do you know you’ll get the same glyphs–that a reg­is­tered trade­mark sym­bol won’t be replaced by an umlaut? Well, you don’t, unless you use OpenType fonts. OpenType fonts have a spe­cif­ic and invi­o­lable posi­tion for every assigned glyph. Only an A is allowed in the slot assigned for the A; if an OpenType font doesn’t include an A–a sym­bol font, for instance–then the A slot must be left emp­ty. This is the rule and law of OpenType font devel­op­ment. XPress 7’s new Unicode sup­port for OpenType fonts means Font Fallback will move through the list of active fonts until it finds one with a glyph in the cor­rect slot; OpenType means that that glyph must be the one intend­ed for that position–the A in this case.

Use OpenType fonts when­ev­er pos­si­ble, and think of Font Fallback as your safe­ty net against falling through emp­ty type boxes.

Color Level-Transparency
Next to Composition Zones and OpenType sup­port, XPress 7’s promise of color-level trans­paren­cy has been the most eager­ly antic­i­pat­ed fea­ture of this new release–perhaps even ahead of all else. Knowing a lit­tle about how dif­fi­cult it is to get soft­ware to affect trans­paren­cy and flat­ten it cor­rect­ly for print, I had strong doubts Quark could pull it off the first time out of the gate. XPress 7 would be a good first effort, I thought, but they wouldn’t get it right until ver­sion 8 or 9.

I was wrong.

Color-level trans­paren­cy is, in most cas­es, more accu­rate­ly thought of as attribute-level trans­paren­cy. Opacity doesn’t work like tints; you can’t cre­ate a 50% trans­par­ent blue swatch any more than you can make all instances of blue across all types of objects 50% trans­par­ent in one fell swoop. Instead, you manip­u­late the opac­i­ty of col­ored attrib­ut­es of objects.

Given a stan­dard pic­ture box, the opac­i­ty of both the box’s frame and back­ground col­ors are inde­pen­dent­ly adjustable. The box can have a 25% opaque back­ground col­or while the frame is 75% or 100% opaque. Simply change the opac­i­ty per­cent­age beside the Tint field on the Colors palette. And, even with trans­paren­cy applied to the box’s attrib­ut­es, box con­tents remain whol­ly opaque–unless you change them too.

Select the Picture Color but­ton on the Colors palette to reveal that it too has an opac­i­ty set­ting. Want a col­ored gel effect on a pho­to­graph? Don’t take it back to Photoshop; just col­or the pic­ture box back­ground and reduce the opac­i­ty of the pic­ture itself. Text, too, can be ren­dered par­tial­ly or whol­ly transparent–and on a per-character basis. The next time you have a head­line that trails off into the dis­tance, real­ly trail it off with dimin­ish­ing opacity!

Wait. Here’s the best part: It prints.

And, oh, boy, is it fast! In 45 sec­onds XPress 7 print­ed a transparency-heavy doc­u­ment while InDesign required near­ly three min­utes to print a com­pa­ra­ble doc­u­ment. Subsequent tests pro­duced sim­i­lar speed gaps on both Mac and Windows computers.

Flattening is han­dled in the updat­ed print dia­log, and is just a sim­ple mat­ter of choos­ing the out­put res­o­lu­tion for ras­ter­i­za­tion. XPress ras­ter­izes on the fly and hands the flat­tened doc­u­ment off to the print­er. When you would rather XPress didn’t han­dle the flat­ten­ing inter­nal­ly, a sim­ple check­box in the print dia­log out­puts the doc­u­ment with trans­paren­cy intact.

Knowing that color-level trans­paren­cy was the big, impor­tant XPress 7 fea­ture in the minds of most design­ers, I planned to test it in round after gru­el­ing round of production-level con­di­tions, fer­ret­ing out every nuance of the feature–the good, the bad, and the ugly. Then, I knew, I would write exten­sive­ly about my expe­ri­ences. It would become the cen­ter­piece of my review. My edi­to­r­i­al about all the oth­er new fea­tures would drop hints about trans­paren­cy, build­ing up to the cli­max of the deep­est cov­er­age pos­si­ble on XPress 7’s color-level trans­paren­cy. But, I can’t turn this into a centerpiece–there isn’t even enough to the fea­ture for a decent hook!

I ran color-level trans­paren­cy through all it’s paces; I pro­duced the projects I intend­ed. I printed–a lot. I made PDFs. Then I print­ed the PDFs. I tore the PDFs apart to see how XPress flat­tened trans­paren­cy. I even recre­at­ed in XPress 7 some of the projects I had pre­vi­ous­ly built in oth­er applications–not just lay­out appli­ca­tions but draw­ing pro­grams, too. I did all that, but it’s not worth report­ing the details because noth­ing went wrong, and noth­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary hap­pened. It. Just. Worked.

I wish I could say more, but this is such a direct fea­ture that there’s noth­ing more to say. It works exact­ly as Quark said it would, and exact­ly as any design­er would think it should. Pick a back­ground, frame, pic­ture, or text col­or, change it’s opac­i­ty, print, go home for the night. It’s uncom­pli­cat­ed and unas­sum­ing. The only thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary is the fact that there’s noth­ing more to it. It just works–and it’s seri­ous­ly cool.

Blend to Transparency
Where color-level trans­paren­cy is the most accu­rate descrip­tion is anoth­er fea­ture of XPress 7 you sim­ply won’t believe until you try it for your­self: solid-to-transparent blends (a.k.a. gra­di­ents). Certain draw­ing appli­ca­tions have had the fea­ture for years, but some still don’t. Moreover, no oth­er lay­out tool can do it.

Blends are made the same way as in pre­vi­ous ver­sions of XPress–on the Colors palette. Choose your blend type, and then pick your two col­ors. The dif­fer­ence now is, you’re no longer stuck fak­ing a blend to trans­paren­cy by drop­ping tints down to 0% (sol­id white or paper col­or). Beside the tint field is a new Opacity field. Merely type in an opac­i­ty per­cent­age or drag the slid­er, and objects behind that color’s side of the blend will pop into view through the blend. You can’t even do this in Illustrator with­out the extra work of build­ing opac­i­ty masks!

Alpha Channel Masks
Alpha chan­nels have long been sup­port­ed for deter­min­ing clip­ping and runaround areas. However, they’ve always been treat­ed as no bet­ter than com­mon clip­ping paths–one-bit trans­paren­cy, 100% there or 100% invis­i­ble. Now that XPress sup­ports tru­ly trans­par­ent objects, alpha chan­nels, with their full range 256 lev­els of opac­i­ty, are used to vary the vis­i­bil­i­ty of images.

Let’s say, for exam­ple, that you have a por­trait atop a trans­par­ent back­ground. In Photoshop, you feath­ered the stray wisps of hair–some strands are even 25, 50, or 65% opaque to enable real­is­tic blend­ing the back­ground. Photoshop auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ates an alpha chan­nel to store this opac­i­ty data. Placing that image into any ear­li­er ver­sion of XPress, with its lim­it of one-bit sup­port for clip­ping, would have left a sol­id col­or halo in the feath­ered areas. In 7, how­ev­er, sim­ply open Modify, and, on the Picture tab, choose the alpha chan­nel embed­ded in the Photoshop doc­u­ment. Ta da! Now the image blends in XPress exact­ly as it does in Photoshop, with feath­ered edges and 25, 50, or 65% opaque strands of hair.

Alpha chan­nel masks are also inde­pen­dent of object-level transparency–an alpha chan­nel mask can be han­dling inter­nal opac­i­ty vari­a­tions while XPress is mak­ing the entire pic­ture 50% more transparent.

Single Layout Mode
XPress 6 intro­duced the metaphor of projects–multiple, dis­tinct or relat­ed lay­outs in a sin­gle doc­u­ment. One project could, for exam­ple, con­tain an entire iden­ti­ty pack­age across sev­er­al layouts–a busi­ness card lay­out, let­ter­head in an 8.5x11-inch lay­out, #10 envelopes in a third lay­out, and so on. Both print and Web projects could hap­pi­ly co-exist in a sin­gle project, with all lay­outs in the project rep­re­sent­ed as tabs at the bot­tom of the doc­u­ment win­dow. Projects are, of course, a very cool con­cept. Throwing in Synchronized Text made the project-layouts metaphor a big step for­ward in doc­u­ment production.

Apparently the tabs were some­thing of an incon­ve­nience for some XPress users when work­ing with sin­gle lay­outs. So, in the New Project dia­log of XPress 7 is a new Single Layout Mode option, which hides the tabs unless you lat­er insert anoth­er lay­out from the Layout menu. A pref­er­ence set­ting tog­gles whether Single Layout Mode should be the default.

Append
If you envi­ous­ly read the pre­vi­ous sec­tion about mul­ti­ple lay­outs in one project, think­ing about your catalog’s twen­ty dif­fer­ent doc­u­ments and wish­ing you would have known about that option last month, rejoice. XPress 6 may have intro­duced the project-layout metaphor, but XPress 7 takes it to the log­i­cal next step (sev­er­al next steps, actu­al­ly; keep read­ing). In addi­tion to import­ing style sheets, col­ors, H&Js, and all the usu­al items from one XPress project into anoth­er, Append now appends lay­outs, too. Got a fold­er full of relat­ed .QXP files that should be togeth­er? Just open XPress 7’s Append dia­log from the File menu, grab your first project, and select Layout from the list. All avail­able lay­outs in the project will appear in the first list to the right. Selectively append them, or click Include All to append all lay­outs at once. XPress auto­mat­i­cal­ly resolves con­flicts with iden­ti­cal­ly named lay­outs by pre­fix­ing a non-unique lay­out name with an underscore.

NOTE: It has been report­ed in oth­er media that the Append (Layout) func­tion will actu­al­ly insert pages from one project (.QXP) into anoth­er layout–for exam­ple, adding project A’s 10 pages to project B’s 10 pages to result in 20 con­tigu­ous pages. This is not the case, nor, I have been told, will it be so in the ship­ping ver­sion of the prod­uct. Appending lay­outs is just that–append­ing one lay­out into anoth­er project; it is not append­ing pages.

Next: Job Tickets and Job Jackets