Desktop Collaboration Easier With New QuarkXPress

Quark yesterday announced that it will make it easier for creative professionals to work together and minimise production errors through feature enhancements in the imminent release of QuarkXPress 7.

Quark yesterday announced that it will make it easier for creative professionals to work together and minimise production errors through feature enhancements in the imminent release of QuarkXPress 7.

Through composition zones, job jackets, and other new and enhanced features, QuarkXPress 7 will make desktop collaboration simple, consistent, and efficient, claimed Quark.

With composition zones, page layout artists, editors and other creative professionals 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 synchronisation palette allows teams to maintain consistent design through the synchronisation of text, pictures, and item attributes, added the company.

"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.

He added: "By delivering these tools, QuarkXPress 7 will help customers achieve their creative goals whilst managing their businesses efficiently." Donal O'Connor, the owner of Compusense, commented: "As an XTensions developer for over 15 years, I've found that QuarkXPress 7 represents a quantum leap in the sheer volume of advanced functions and interfaces.

The collaborative features, job jackets, and transparency options alone will reinforce that QuarkXPress has always been and remains, the world's leading publishing software." Quark said that in traditional linear workflows, contributors must wait for other team members to complete their work in a layout before they can work on their assignments.

With QuarkXPress 7, team members can make changes to the same QuarkXPress page at the same time.

QuarkXPress 7 composition zones are said to be suitable for any fast-paced environment where people need to work on various aspects of a page or layout simultaneously.

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 advertisement on the same page.

A newsletter publisher might have a graphic designer positioning an article in a layout, whilst 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.

With composition zones, QuarkXPress 7 will enable desktop collaboration, which will reduce design, editorial, and production cycles, added Quark.

In addition to promoting more efficient collaboration, QuarkXPress 7 will help workgroups obtain consistent output by sharing specifications across workstations using job jackets.

The job jackets, according to Quark, feature takes a step beyond pre-flighting.

It will help ensure that a print job adheres to its specifications from the moment it is created and that it continues to adhere to those specifications all the way through until it rolls off of the press.

Job jackets are also claimed to expand the concept of job specification management beyond the realm of the individual user, 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.

Whilst workgroups collaborate on creative development, QuarkXPress will track pre-defined 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 distribution, and can initiate processes in JDF-enabled automated systems via job messaging format (JMF).

Combined with the design-oriented information contained in job jackets, JDF becomes a comprehensive communications platform for the graphic arts industry, believes Quark.

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 Synchronisation palette will accept any type of item, including picture boxes, text boxes, lines and text paths.

When items are added to the synchronisation palette, users 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.

Quark also said that it is building on work done by standards organisations, such as the International Colour Consortium (ICC) to promote a uniform approach to colour management and Quark is working to bring the benefits of colour management to designers and output specialists by simplifying key aspects of colour management, as the company believes that traditionally, the biggest challenge of reaping the rewards of colour management has been maintaining consistency over time and across diverse and changing workgroups.

QuarkXPress 7 is claimed to address the concerns of larger publishing groups by making colour management settings portable and easy to set up and it is said to address the concerns of smaller users by providing a set of default colour management settings.

New previewing options allow designers to see what they are doing with colour whilst they are doing it, preventing problems later in the process and helping to ensure accurate output.

With new transparency features to be included in QuarkXPress 7, users can specify the opacity of the elements that make up any item or content in QuarkXPress - text, pictures, blends, boxes, frames, lines and tables, for instance.

It is claimed that QuarkXPress 7 will provide greater control over transparency than other applications 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 users to adjust masks on the fly in a layout.

Quarkvista, which was first introduced in QuarkXPress 6.5, adds image editing effects to QuarkXPress.

Users can correct images with adjustments to brightness, contrast, colour balance, and hue and saturation, and create special effects with filters such as Gaussian blur, unsharp mask and emboss.

QuarkXPress 7 will improve those 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, whilst preserving the integrity of the original image, allowing use of a single graphic resource anywhere, claimed Quark.

QuarkXPress 7 will also expand 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 in to Opentype fonts, including special characters and fonts required by different languages, added the company.

"Complete Unicode and Opentype support will allow us to substantially simplify the publication of multilingual documents.

Typographical improvements such as automatic ligature replacement or the ability to save favourite glyphs make it easier to work with type and is a substantial improvement to the product," said Sebastin Nafroth, owner of 3f8h.net.

In QuarkXPress 7, users will be able to see how detailed changes affect an entire page, layout, or project by splitting the QuarkXPress window in to two or more panes or opening any number of new windows for a project.

To maximise workspace, users will be able to create custom palette groupings that can be expanded, collapsed, and resized according to user needs.

The Measurements palette will be improved with different tabs that change according to the selected item in the layout.

Everyday features such as tab settings and item alignment have been redesigned so users can work faster and smarter, it is said.

Quark commented that tables will be enhanced in QuarkXPress 7, with new table grouping, table rotation, auto-fit, non-anchored continued tables and header and footer rows features.

It will also include features to select all even rows, even columns, odd rows, or odd columns in a table for formatting, which lets users shade every other row in a table to improve readability.

QuarkXPress 7 will automatically resize table cells as necessary to accommodate data from an imported Microsoft Excel table.

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