By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in QuarkXPress on August 7, 2008 at 11:50 am
Three hundred quid to upgrade from QuarkXPress 7 to 8 is ridiculously too expensive. Especially as QuarkXPress 6 users can get the same deal and in return a far better piece of software than the one they are using at the moment.
Don’t take this the wrong way. Quark made incremental changes to XPress that, arguably, leave inDesign in the shade. The latter seems ideal for one-spread-wonders but a slow, buggy and clunky tool for real desktop publishing. It’s not without reason that the UK book industry is still largely wedded to XPress.
The latest version of XPress is available as a free download that functions for a full 60 days. It is well worth a test, especially for those Luddites still using QuarkXPress 6. On-screen display of text alone makes the upgrade to XPress 7 or 8 an immediate must-have.
Abridged too far?
Also in QXP 8 Xtensions such as the XPert Tools suite and Quark’s Interactive Designer introduced in XPress 7, are now fully integrated into the program. Many of the features are old hat to inDesign users but for Quark, box styles, Flash export and the like are new toys. For some reason Quark did not include all the features from XPert Tools, many of the most useful are missing: multiple-page pasting, scaling groups and layout settings, for example.
Where QuarkXPress 8 really scores is in new typographical features. This includes new styles for hanging indents, something inDesign has had for years, and more sophisticated vertical alignment. This is very important when text contains in-line objects or type that is larger than the text surrounding it. Until now they would all line up to their baselines but XPress 8 can control how they align, whether from the top, centreline or baseline. No excuses now for ugly vertical spacing.
The Good and the Ugly
Rated: 63.33% (6 votes)
Loading ...Comment by davesofnj - August 7, 2008 on 7:52 pm
>know how bad Adobe
Comment by - August 8, 2008 on 7:44 am
Can’t post a snippet but in the past when I’ve typeset books, using both the optical and metrics options, inDesign has a nasty habit of squeezing word and letter spacing too far.
Then, more recently, converting inDesign CS3 files to QuarkXPress 7 using MarkzTools, the file transfer perfectly but the state of Adobe’s typesetting is revealed when you compare the same text set in inDesign with it set in XPress. Again, it’s the letter and word spacing. The same when converting XPress files to inDesign, the text XPress 7 is clearly a better set when comparing them.
Quark reworked their type engine in XPress 7 and it’s a huge amount better than before.
Comment by John Nolan - August 8, 2008 on 9:43 pm
You do know that one can vary the word and letter space to one’s tast in InDesign,don’t you?
If the letter spacing is too tight in InDesign, it’s because someone set the parameters poorly. One can’t really blame InDesign for that.
Comment by - August 9, 2008 on 8:44 am
Yes I know about setting the spacing. But with long text runs - books - it can all be fine apart from the occasional paragraph and that usually doesn’t show up on screen, or not enough to notice.
I switched back to XPress when 7 came out but have to keep a foot in both camps which is blinking expensive.
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