Product: QuarkXPress 4.04
From: Quark Inc. www.quark.com
For: Macintosh, Windows
Street Price: about $1000
Pros: Version 4.0 adds Illustrator-like bezier curve support and impressive new drawing and text-handling features. Early bugs were swiftly addressed with the 4.01r1 update, released Jan. 30, 1998, and subsequently improved further in later updates. Currently, the program is at version 4.04.
Cons: Expensive. No intrinsic HTML support. Limited PDF support. Default color matching system is not well suited to flat tints and solid colors. Reports of bugs persist.
Strongest Competitors: QuarkXPress 3.3x, Adobe PageMaker, Adobe FrameMaker, Corel Ventura Publisher, Microsoft Publisher 2.0. Adobe InDesign can load QuarkXPress 3.3 and 4.0 files.
"Never buy version 1.0 of anything," I often tell people. What many people don't realize is that version 3 or 4 of a program usually falls prey to the same, seemingly immutable, law of the universe. If it's the initial release of a major upgrade, it's going to have more bugs than a Mexican dumpster. For example, version 4.0 of QuarkXPress was prone to crashes when basing one character style sheet on another. The Mac version would crash when printing certain 3.3x documents over a network. Windows 95/NT were plagued with bugs like one where an "Unexpected end-of-file encountered" error would occur when choosing File –> Save Page as EPS with no printers installed, and subsequently re-importing that EPS. And, version 4.0's color management system failed to detect embedded profiles in TIFFs.
Thankfully, updates were made available in the months following the program's initial release that address these, and numerous other bugs. Additionally, the company has released a free plugin (an "XTension," in Quark parlance) called TypeTricks 1.0 that adds features users of 3.3 might have missed when they upgraded and lost access to the "Bobzilla" and "Thingamabob" XTensions. These add-ons provided such niceties as automatic fractions and price formatting to XPress documents created with version 3.x. Now, Type Tricks does the same for users of the Windows and MacOS versions of QuarkXPress 4.0.
QuarkXPress 4.0 alleviates much of the need for a separate illustration program, such as Adobe Illustrator. Quark's new Bezier tool allows text on a path and can paste graphics inside images and perform several other new text tricks. Speaking of tricks, an old Easter Egg is still present in v4.0. Select an item on-screen and press Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K (Command+Shift+Option+K on the Mac) to see it.
The EFIcolor (color management) extension of previous versions is gone; replaced with a ColorSync-compatible CMS that will undoubtedly please graphics professionals, at least until they discover some of its limitations. The most obvious limitation in the 4.0 release was its inability to extract color profiles embedded in TIFF images. This made for extra work, as such profiles had to be re-applied. If you did not know which profile to use, it could lead to inappropriate colors and, in any case, it amounted to extra work, particularly on jobs with a lot of images from multiple sources. Fortunately, an update that addresses this issue is available, albeit for the Windows version only. Another problem is the program's inclination to use "perceptual matching" as its default color matching model. This is not well suited to flat tints and solid colors. Third-party XTensions, such as Helios Software GmbH's ColorSync XTension, attempt to detect (usually quite successfully) the "intent" of the page they are rendering and apply the most appropriate color model. Quark's XTension doesn't make that effort.
The best part of this upgrade is the fact that it doesn't require significant training to upgrade to it. Unlike Adobe, which dramatically changed Adobe Illustrator between v6.0 and 7.0, and subsequently suffered the wrath of professional users who found their productivity lessened because of it, Quark made the changes fairly subtle. We think most users will find it a tasty upgrade -- but we urge those in production environments to be cautious. Just because the program offers a "Save as v3.3x" option doesn't mean that it works completely reliably. As with all changes to a managed workflow, be careful to test this upgrade thoroughly with your existing documents and printers -- and ask the technicians at your local service bureau what situations they have encountered with the newest 4.04 release. Although 4.0 was rightfully criticized as buggy (although you could hardly call it rushed to market -- the 3.0 version of QuarkXPress was released way back in 1990!), the 4.04 upgrade provides a number of bug-fixes and other improvements that should make it easier to digest.
Updates:
Some service bureaus report that certain files, typically those with placed EPS images, may not print reliably with QuarkXPress 4.0, although they print fine from v3.x. Be sure you have the latest updates from Quark's website and exercise caution before upgrading production machines.
Note also that some XTensions -- the Quark terminology for plug-ins -- require a post-4.0 update. Extensis' BeyondPress, for example, requires version 4.03 or later to work. The US$349 BeyondPress adds HTML export capabilities to QuarkXPress. Quark also has a beta version of an HTML exporter, the long-awaited 1.0 version of its PDF import/export tool as well as a number of other enhancements to the program at its website.
Quark pre-announced of QuarkXPress 5.0 at the Seybold conference in Boston on March 3rd, 1999. The company at that time said QuarkXPress 5.0 would ship later in 1999. And, as so often happens in the software world, this schedule slipped. The company showed off a beta release of the new version at the Drupa conference in May 2000 and now says the 5.0 release should ship by the end of the year.
Other updates are available as well at http://www.quark.com/ftp008.htm
Users interested in this category of software should also look at DTP packages such as InDesign, PageMaker.
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