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

The behav­ior of the style but­tons has not changed in 7: they still fake styles, even when used on OpenType fonts that include gen­uine super­script, sub­script, supe­ri­or, or small caps glyphs. (Underlining and strik­ing through text is anoth­er issue, but I’ll let that go for now.) Clicking Small Caps, Superscript, Subscript, or Superior style but­tons on the Measurements palette will not access those fea­tures of an OpenType font. Instead, you have to get to those fea­tures by click­ing the green and black O OpenType menu on the Measurements palette and choos­ing styles one at a time. What could have been as easy as sin­gle click now requires two clicks and deal­ing with a menu. This is a true shame and a nui­sance for design­ers who care about good type.

XPress 7 should encode the style but­tons to first check that the active font is an OpenType, then look for, and use if present, the appro­pri­ate fea­tures with­in the OpenType font, and, final­ly, only fall back on the old faux meth­ods if nei­ther of the oth­er two con­di­tions has been met.

Another (rel­a­tive­ly minor) issue observed in XPress 7 regard­ing OpenType sup­port is that slashed zeros must be indi­vid­u­al­ly insert­ed man­u­al­ly via the Glyphs palette despite the fact that OpenType fonts have the capa­bil­i­ty of doing the sub­sti­tu­tion on the fly–if the appli­ca­tion sup­ports it, which XPress doesn’t.

Again, XPress 7 gets much more right with regard to OpenType than it gets wrong. The fact that it sup­ports as much as it does on this, it’s first round with OpenTypes, is to be applaud­ed. OpenType could be bet­ter, but it’s already very, very good.

PDFs
Native PDF gen­er­a­tion via the JAWS PDF engine was added to XPress with ver­sion 6. Now, in ver­sion 7, it works. (That isn’t the ugly part.)

In ver­sion 6.x, PDFs failed more than half the time. XPress seemed to cre­ate them–and, indeed, a PDF would appear in the tar­get folder–but noth­ing could read it, not even JAWS own PDF view­ers. Often those PDFs that did open in view­ers failed to RIP. Ultimately, XPress users uni­ver­sal­ly revert­ed back to print­ing to Adobe PDF vir­tu­al print­er, or to the old two-step method of print­ing to PostScript and distilling.

In total, I gen­er­at­ed 52 PDFs from new­ly cre­at­ed XPress 7 projects as well as ver­sion 4, 5, and 6.5 doc­u­ments opened into 7. Not one of the result­ing PDFs failed to open in Acrobat. All ten of the ones I tried to open in OS 10.4.5’s Viewer also opened with­out issue. Further, the PDFs print­ed just fine–albeit very, very slow­ly. (This is the ugly part.) They print­ed slow­ly because the PDFs were mas­sive. From one, three-page 1.2 MB XPress project, the export­ed PDFs invari­ably bal­looned to 24.5–27.8 MBs. Larger XPress doc­u­ments beget equal­ly larg­er PDFs.

I ran through all the export options includ­ing pre­serv­ing trans­paren­cy, dis­card­ing trans­paren­cy and flat­ten­ing at var­i­ous res­o­lu­tions, using the stan­dard PDF v. 1.4 (Acrobat 5‑compatible) for­mat, PDF/X‑1a, PDF/X‑3, and numer­ous com­pres­sion set­tings. No mat­ter what I tried, the result­ing PDFs were gigantic.

This, is seri­ous­ly ugly. The good news? XPress 7 is still in beta; there’s still a chance for Quark or JAWS to turn the beast into the beau­ty. Other than file size and lack of sup­port for recent PDF 1.5 and 1.6 ver­sions, XPress exports qual­i­ty PDFs.

The Final Word

XPress 7 is a major new fea­tures upgrade, but many of the old frus­tra­tions linger. The same bad and ugly issues men­tioned above are like­ly to remain parts of XPress for years to come–just as most have been in XPress for many years and ver­sions already. There seems to be an inter­nal strug­gle in the col­lec­tive Quark mind between pleas­ing cus­tomers ret­i­cent to change, and advanc­ing the state of the art for those who want to go fur­ther in their work.

Quark wants too much to pla­cate cus­tomers who are resis­tant to change–which, in all fair­ness, rep­re­sents a large por­tion of XPress’s cur­rent installed user base. Many XPress users have relied on the appli­ca­tion for near­ly two decades. They’re set in their ways, old dogs who refuse to learn new tricks and fight any attempt to advance the state of pub­lish­ing. Ironically, these are often the same indi­vid­u­als who embraced XPress in the 1980s, when oth­er old dogs stood firm on pho­to­type­set­ters and man­u­al paste-up. Publishing, in all its forms and parts, is an evolv­ing, grow­ing life form. Adobe invent­ed computer-hosted soft fonts, not the process of putting type to page. Gutenberg invent­ed the press, not the con­cept of books. Too much of XPress is being held back by a desire to please those for whom what they know will always be bet­ter than what they don’t know.

Within XPress 7 are sev­er­al next gen­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies and tools, chief among them shared con­tent, QuarkXClusive, color-level trans­paren­cy, and job tick­ets and jack­ets. Support for OpenType fonts, alpha chan­nel trans­paren­cy, reli­able onscreen proof­ing, and func­tion­al PDF export are catch-ups to cur­rent needs that oth­er appli­ca­tions have been fill­ing for years. XPress 7 should not have been the first ver­sion to deliv­er on these solu­tions. It wouldn’t have been if the inno­v­a­tive side of Quark’s mind was stronger than the side that wants to main­tain the sta­tus quo. More impor­tant­ly, 7 would con­tain few­er decades old pain points and frus­tra­tions if the inno­va­tion side were stronger.

The bat­tle between XPress and InDesign is often char­ac­ter­ized as a war of prod­uct devel­op­ment ver­sus mar­ket­ing. That’s rhetoric, regard­less of which side utters it. History has born out the fact that Quark research­es the cur­rent state of cus­tomer­s’ work­flows, while Adobe asks cus­tomers direct­ly what they want tomorrow.

Quark’s stat­ed strat­e­gy “is not to focus on the fea­ture sets of alter­na­tive prod­ucts but on the cur­rent needs of our installed base.” The rea­son those “alternative prod­uct­s” have tak­en so much of XPress’s installed base is because they start­ed fresh. InDesign was not an upgrade to PageMaker. InDesign was a fresh, new look at the current–and future–needs of the pub­lish­ing and design indus­tries. Adobe kept PageMaker alive, indulging the old dogs, for a rea­son­able peri­od of time, then cut it off. Quark needs to fol­low the same path, start­ing fresh and build­ing a whole new XPress to answer not only the cur­rent needs of its installed base, but tomorrow’s needs as well. And, they need to walk away from the things that keep the old dogs old and adapt­able users away.

XPress 7 is a major step for­ward for both cus­tomers and Quark. It shows that the inno­va­tors with­in Quark know where they need to take XPress, and that they are grad­u­al­ly gain­ing strength and sup­port. They must keep push­ing. QuarkXPress 8 should be able to wipe away the entire Bad and Ugly lists.

Buying Advice
InDesign CS2 is still a supe­ri­or prod­uct in many of the ways that count, but the list has grown sig­nif­i­cant­ly short­er. More impor­tant­ly, XPress 7 is final­ly a strong stand that not only meets some of InDesign’s key fea­tures, it beats them.

If you are a QuarkXPress 3, 4, 5, or 6 user in a team-based peri­od­i­cal pub­lish­ing work­flow, the cost of upgrade–whatever it turns out to be–is worth it. Send Quark a blank check right now. Composition zones and shared con­tent alone will bear out an accept­able ROI as they stream­line your work­flow. Editing kern­ing and track­ing tables, OpenType, the Glyphs palette, QuarkXClusive, soft proof­ing, and out­put styles sweet­en the benefits.

Those of you for whom InDesign CS or CS2 is the tool of choice in any work­flow, switch­ing to XPress is not recommended–especially if you hap­pi­ly con­vert­ed from XPress. New XPress fea­tures like com­po­si­tion zones, color-level trans­paren­cy, and the almost new Synchronized Text and mul­ti­ple lay­outs are indeed a leap for­ward into the future of desk­top pub­lish­ing. XPress 7 also address­es many of the biggest prob­lems with pre­vi­ous ver­sions, but most of the old Quark quirks are still there. Diehard fans will feel right at home with their prac­ticed workarounds. Those who threw up their hands and left XPress prob­a­bly won’t be wooed back just yet.

Though, I don’t rec­om­mend switch­ing from InDesign to QuarkXPress 7, I whol­ly rec­om­mend that the adver­tis­ing indus­try, design stu­dios, free­lancers, and cre­ative job seek­ers learn to use it along­side InDesign.

Quark has joined the bat­tle now. In six months, the lines defin­ing the ter­ri­to­ries held by these two pow­er­house pub­lish­ing giants will not be as clear­ly defined as they are today.

For some work­flows, XPress 7’s new fea­tures and updates make it the clear appli­ca­tion of choice. For oth­ers, InDesign CS2 is still the only way to go. For the vast major­i­ty of the design and pub­lish­ing mar­ket that isn’t in a closed work­flow, stay­ing cur­rent and com­pet­i­tive will hence­forth mean using both (again).

In terms of Quark ver­sus InDesign, peo­ple have come to sum­ma­rize the war and every individual’s opin­ion of both appli­ca­tions in the form of a sin­gle ques­tion: Would you choose QuarkXPress or InDesign to begin new projects? Yesterday, my answer was sim­ple: I would start rough­ly 5% of my new projects in XPress, using InDesign for the rest. Today, it’s not so sim­ple an answer. I will still begin most new projects in InDesign CS2, but I’ll hap­pi­ly reach for XPress 7 when my project can sur­vive the lim­i­ta­tions and when it needs color-level trans­paren­cy and advanced collaboration.

Is it a revolution?
Industry buzz said QuarkXPress 7 will rev­o­lu­tion­ize pub­lish­ing. Is it revolutionary?

It’s impor­tant, cer­tain­ly. It’s impor­tant because it demon­strates that Quark has final­ly rec­og­nized that it’s in a war for mar­ket share–and its exis­tence. XPress 7 is impor­tant because the world need­ed to know whether Quark could still inno­vate. It can.

XPress 7 is not the InDesign-killer a vocal­ly zeal­ous minor­i­ty pur­port­ed it to be. XPress and InDesign are at war, and war is nev­er black and white. There are no com­pe­ti­tion killers in the offing–from either side. This is not a war of mar­ket­ing or price points no mat­ter how much fans of either side try to make it so. This is a war of inno­va­tion. As long as both XPress and InDesign con­tin­ue to antic­i­pate and meet the needs of cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, as long each one inno­vates new fea­tures the oth­er doesn’t have while striv­ing to meet what it does, the war will rage–to the ben­e­fit of every­one who uses either appli­ca­tion. When the inevitable end does come, it will be because one side or the oth­er has stopped innovating.

The print­ing press, that was rev­o­lu­tion­ary. So was PostScript. The World Wide Web was rev­o­lu­tion­ary. QuarkXPress 7 is evo­lu­tion­ary. Unlocking the one file:one design­er ratio is the biggest step Quark could have tak­en toward the future. And, while XPress 7 still has its pain points–large and small–it’s a major step for­ward. It won’t for­ev­er alter the way doc­u­ments are pub­lished, but it does evolve the doc­u­ment cre­ation process into a high­er life form.

I am thor­ough­ly impressed with, and excit­ed by, QuarkXPress 7, and I hope the end of the war doesn’t come for a long, long time.

Quark, QuarkXPress, Quark 7, QuarkXPress 7, InDesign, CS2, Adobe, PDF, VDP, PPML, desk­top pub­lish­ing, dtp, how-to