Quark demonstrates the typographical support in what it is calling its "most significant upgrade."LONDON—At the TypoTechnica 2005 conference Thursday, Quark Inc. gave the first look at the next version of its flagship product, QuarkXPress 7, claiming the update will be "the most significant upgrade in the product's history."
In the historic surroundings of the St Bride Print Library, Scott Wieseler, product analyst in Quark's product marketing group, was joined by Quark's UK director of market, Gavin Drake, to give attendees an hour-long demonstration of the typographical support in the update, as well as revealing that the product will ship this year.
XPress 7 is "the biggest rewrite we've ever done, and the most significant upgrade we've ever done," Drake said. To implement full support for both Unicode and OpenType, the company has done significant work rewriting its core text engine, compartmentalizing many parts of its code to make it simpler to add features now and in the future.
QuarkXPress7's support for Unicode will include a significant new feature called Font Fallback. This allows users to specify that, if a font doesn't contain a full set of glyphs for non-Roman characters, it should fall back to using an alternative font rather than failing to display the imported text in full.
As an example of this, Wieseler demonstrated importing text that included Cyrillic, Greek and Chinese characters, in a font that didn't include the Chinese glyphs. With Font Fallback turned on, XPress automatically found an alternative set of glyphs from a related font, substituting the missing characters. Although in the initial release it will not be possible for users to define lists of which alternate fonts it should use for substitution, this is under consideration for a future release.
Quark opens QuarkXpress file format to XML reading. Click here to read more.
As part of its support for Unicode, QuarkXPress 7 will feature a new Glyph Palette. Rather that use the system palettes in both Mac OS X and Windows, Quark has chosen to develop its own, to retain equivalent functionality across operating systems and give better integration with the product's layout tools.
The palette, which the company emphasized is still in the earliest stages of user interface development, includes a pop-up menu for selecting groups of related glyphs—for example, any Roman characters in a non-Roman font—as well as a "Favorites" well at the bottom for storing often-used glyphs. Selecting a glyph on the page highlights the same glyph in the palette, and alternates—for example, a small caps version of a particular letter—can be selected by clicking and holding down the glyph in the palette.
However, it is the full support for OpenType fonts that is likely to most excite designers. Although QuarkXPress 6 supported OpenType fonts, this was limited to the first 256 glyphs of any font out of a total of over 65,000 potential characters. Many features of OpenType are applied as styling, on either a per-character or style sheet basis.
The program will support a total of around 23 OpenType features, including standard and discretionary ligatures and swashes. Full support for fractions is included, either by substituting a predefined fractional glyph or by creating one according to embedded rules. And, when exporting text, the XPress Tags file format will include support for export and import of OpenType-tagged files, allowing all OpenType-related information to be preserved.
One feature that will not be in XPress 7 is a multiline composer, similar to that in the current version of InDesign. However, according to Wieseler, the rewrite of the core text engine in XPress will allow this to be implemented in a future release.
And the implementation of OpenType support is likely to lead to a re-evaluation of Quark Passport, the multilanguage version of XPress that includes support for Dutch, German and Nordic languages, as well as many others. Support for OpenType will, according to Drake, allow the company to unify the code bases for XPress and XPress Passport for the first time.
"Once this is done, it becomes a marketing decision rather than a technical one," he said. "Do we sell just one package, with support for all languages? Do you allow users to select which languages they want, and sell them exactly that? At present, no decision has been made."
Quark has recently undergone significant internal restructuring, including the departure of long-standing Chairman and CEO Fred Ebrahimi in favor of 10-year Quark veteran Kamar Aulakh. According to Drake, these changes have included a trebling of field staff, and the introduction of free unlimited technical support in English.
"In 2003, Quark attended six events worldwide. In 2004, that had increased to nearly 40, and that's something we're going to continue. Quark in 2005 is a very different company [from a few years ago]," Drake added.
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