QuarkXPress 7

Quark XPress holds a warm place in the heart of many journalists and layout artists. It's been around for well over ten years (a lifetime in computing terms) and has built up an army of satisfied users. It's very likely indeed that most newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and posters you see will have been designed using Xpress.

However, this isn't to say that Xpress is some kind of übersoftware, capable of amazing DTP tricks. In fact, it's a very deceptively simple program which, along with the fact that designers are trained in Xpress early in their careers, is what accounts for its success.

Unlike every other DTP or even every other graphics program, Quark Xpress uses a single row of icons through which all the main functions are accessed. The toolbar features primarily frame, text box and shape tools which, when it boils down to it, are all you need in page design. At the bottom of the screen there’s a context-sensitive palette which shows various parameters and settings, such as font name and size, or the co-ordinates of the mouse cursor at any given time.

There are other floating toolbars available if you want them - just click on the View menu - and the standard complement for most layout artists is the Colours toolbar (which includes Pantone support), the Document Layout toolbar (which enables you to jump around the pages in the document at ease), and the Styles toolbar (which lets you globally apply typeface attributes).

However, digging deeper reveals some extraordinary features. You can draw text boxes or frames in freehand using your mouse, for example, while an entire range of useful predefined text boxes and frames are also available. Elsewhere, you'll find that this version of Quark Xpress shares In Design's ability to automatically generate cut-out clipping paths around photographs, saving the bother of manually generating them in Photoshop. The Xtensions manager lets you add-in third party programs to Xpress's arsenal, boosting its feature base even more (albeit for a fee).

Xpress's trouble comes from the very thing that makes it so appealing to many - its idiosyncrasy. Quark Xpress does things in its own peculiar way. Unlike virtually every other Windows program in the world, it doesn't make much use of context sensitive right-click menus, for example.

Elsewhere, keyboard combinations like CTRL+A, to select all the text in the frame, produces an irritating beep of non-compliance, whilst the things that can be undone with CTRL+Z are very limited. Elsewhere again, when you draw a text frame, the cursor doesn't always automatically appear inside (whether the cursor appears depends on what tool you had selected prior to drawing the frame). These are things that experience will overcome, but to a newcomer, they're damned irritating.

The Good:

People use QuarkXPress® for creative design and page layout more than any other software in the world.

The Bad

QuarkXPress menu contains many features and it’s a little bit hard to memorize all the menus.

The Truth

QuarkXPress 7 surpasses the competition in design, collaboration, and production having lots of features.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: