Product: QuarkXPress 5.0
From: Quark Inc. www.quark.com
For: Macintosh, Windows
Price: US$1000. Upgrades cost US$400 from v3.0; US$300 from v4.0.
Pros: New features include tables, layers. Improved PDF support. Web-page creation, XML support. Collect for output now gathers screen and printer fonts as well as ICC profiles. See http://www.quark.com for more.
Cons: No 68K support, not Carbonized for Mac OS X. Only one Undo. Tables cannot be transparent.
Strongest Competitors: QuarkXPress 4.1, Adobe InDesign.
The Rocky Road to QuarkXPress 5.0
Quark was quick to counter Adobe's release of InDesign with a pre-announcement of QuarkXPress 5.0 at the Seybold conference in Boston way back in March, 1999. The company at that time said QuarkXPress 5.0 would ship later in 1999. And, as so often happens in the software world, that schedule slipped -- badly. The company then showed off a beta release of XPress 5.0 at the Drupa conference in May 2000 and claimed the final release would ship by the end of Y2K. It didn't. Another beta version of QuarkXPress 5.0 was trotted out again at the Seyboard Publishing Conference in April 2001 by Quark staffers. At the time, Quark boss Fred Ebrahimi said the final version would ship "when it's ready." The company took a lot of heat over the buggy initial release of QuarkXPress 4.0 and was clearly not eager to repeat that fiasco.
A number of features had already been seen, but a few new pieces of information emerged at the Seybold showing. One notable change from previous releases appears to be the absence of a dongle in international versions. Many North American Quark users don't realize it, but international users of the program in the past have been saddled with an unwieldy hardware-based copy protection system. Apparently Quark has finally realized that it was a pain in the ass for legitimate users and did next to nothing to stop the spread of "de-dongled" versions, anyway.
In Jan. 2002, the company finally shipped the program: a full two-and-a-half years late -- a delay that's causing a great deal of concern from Mac users who are incensed that the update is not yet "Carbonized" for native-mode compatibility with Apple's OS X, released nearly a year earlier. It is also the first version of QuarkXPress to not support 68K Macs. This was a tough decision to make, says the company, as a large percentage of its audience still users older Macs.
Available Now
Quark, in Sept. 2001 released a beta version of QuarkXPress 5.0 for Macintosh and Windows at www.quark.com. (This beta version expired in 90 days and is no longer available.) The final release of Quark XPress 5.0 for Macintosh, which is shipping now, supports OS 8.x, 9.x or OS X Classic only; the Windows release supports Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000 and XP. Interestingly, the program's documentation cautions that "Saving a document from OS X Classic to a Windows 2000 server in Classic OS X format can damage the document. To resolve this problem, update the OS version to 10.1." Read more about the program in a PDF document at www.quark.com.
We've written a report about our tests of the program so far. See page 2 for more....
For Further Reading:
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