Quark has lifted the lid on the latest version of its popular desktop publishing app, QuarkXPress. Version 7.0 promises to make it easier for creative professionals to work together and minimise production errors. Through 'composition zones,' 'Job Jackets,' and other new and enhanced features, QuarkXPress 7 should make desktop collaboration simpler and more consistent.

With composition zones, design teams can work on the same page simultaneously and view each other's changes automatically. Using Job Jackets, workgroups can share specifications across workstations, and the shared content palette allows teams to maintain consistent design through the synchronisation of text, pictures, and item attributes.

For example, a publisher might have two users working on a single article: one layout artist creating the overall look of the page, and another designing a fractional ad on the same page. A newsletter publisher might have a graphic designer positioning an article in a layout while an editor fits copy, adds captions, and enters corrections. Updates to zones within a QuarkXPress page appear in the layout artist's QuarkXPress project as soon as they are saved.

'The enhanced graphics capabilities of QuarkXPress 7 make the design experience more satisfying than ever. With creativity flowing this naturally, creative professionals can work together more effectively, and QuarkXPress 7 makes parallel workflows a reality,' said Juergen Kurz, senior vice president of product development at Quark. 'By delivering these tools, QuarkXPress 7 will help customers achieve their creative goals while managing their businesses efficiently. We're excited to take publishing software to this next level.'

Job Jackets expand the concept of job specification management, allowing workgroups to maintain consistency between related projects - even when changes in specifications occur - by linking projects to synchronised, dynamically updated design specifications that include everything from style sheets and colours to page size and count. While workgroups collaborate on creative development, QuarkXPress will track predefined output parameters and eliminate time wasted reworking content to meet production specifications.

Job Jackets take advantage of existing networks and open file formats. They are based on the open Job Definition Format (JDF) standard, which provides a standard format for storing information about print jobs and facilitating the automation of many print-related processes. JDF files can include information about scanning, printing, binding, cutting, and even distribution, and can initiate processes in JDF-enabled automated systems via Job Messaging Format (JMF).

QuarkXPress will also introduce new features to promote consistency and automate changes across layouts by synchronising text, pictures, and item attributes, including text formatting, picture effects, colours, and drop shadows. The shared content palette will accept any type of item, including picture boxes, text boxes, lines, and text paths. When items are added to the shared content palette, you can specify what is synchronised: item attributes, content attributes, or content only. Changes to one synchronised item will reflect in all instances of that synchronised item, including on master pages.

With new transparency, you can specify the opacity of the elements that make up any item or content in QuarkXPress - text, pictures, blends, boxes, frames, lines, tables, and more. QuarkXPress 7 will provide greater control over transparency by managing opacity levels for any colour element of an object rather than on an object-by-object basis. The transparency features will also enable the creation of dynamic, soft drop shadows, as well as the ability to mask pictures with soft edges using alpha channels - including native Photoshop transparency in PSD or TIFF format - and will allow you to adjust masks on the fly in a layout.

QuarkVista, which was first introduced in QuarkXPress 6.5, adds image editing effects. You can correct images with adjustments to brightness/contrast, colour balance, and hue/saturation, and create special effects with filters such as Gaussian blur, unsharp mask, and emboss. QuarkXPress 7 will improve these features, and add support for additional image file types, more sophisticated editing, and synchronised effects. Enhancements to QuarkVista will continue to expand work-in-place editing abilities while preserving the integrity of the original image, allowing use of a single graphic resource anywhere.

QuarkXPress 7 also expands its access to special characters through Unicode support, OpenType support, and interface improvements that make it easy to insert special characters without looking up keyboard commands or resorting to third-party software. The release will offer full support for the multitude of characters and typographic features built into OpenType fonts, including special characters and fonts required by different languages.

Finally, tables have been improved, with new table grouping, table rotation, auto-fit, non-anchored continued tables, and header and footer rows features. It will also include handy features to select all even rows, even columns, odd rows, or odd columns in a table for formatting, which lets you shade every other row in a table easily to improve readability. QuarkXPress 7 will automatically resize table cells as necessary to accommodate data from an imported Microsoft Excel table.

BIOS, Sep 15, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Graphics