Quark's first major release in two years offers transparency and other new features, but faces stiff competition from Adobe and a rapidly-changing marketplace.Quark announced May 23 the release of QuarkXPress 7, the first update to its QuarkXPress graphic layout program in two years.
With this release, Quark is attempting to rejoin the desktop publishing battle with Adobe. Quark has been losing market share to Adobe, of San Jose, Calif., ever since the latter company launched its InDesign software in 1999. Quark executives stressed at the launch event, however, that XPress is still the most widely used page layout program in the design industry.
XPress 7 offers several eagerly awaited new features, including composition zones, job jackets, transparency, and support for OpenType and Unicode fonts.
Quark, based in Denver, said it is hoping these new features will "transform the business of creative communications" by helping creative professionals work more efficiently.
Click here to read about Quark's CEO problems.
For example, the new composition zones in XPress 7 let creative professionals work on the same page, at the same time, and automatically view each other's changes, according to Quark.
The job jacket feature enables workgroups to share specifications across workstations. And a synchronization palette enables teams of creative professionals to ensure that design is consistent—synchronizing text, pictures, and other items and their attributes.
The new transparency features enable users to specify the opacity of the elements that make up any item—text, pictures, blends, boxes, frames, lines, tables and the like.
XPress 7 also embraces XML-based PPML (Personalized Print Markup Language), and uses JDF (Job Definition Format), which has emerged as a standard for storing information about print jobs.
XPress 7 will not ship May 23 in universal binary. Quark is currently beta testing a universal binary version of XPress 7 that will run on both Power PC and Intel-based Macs. That version will be available later in the summer of 2006 as a free update to XPress 7, according to executives.
But is it too late?
Sources familiar with QuarkXPress 7's features say that the software is more capable than competitors' current products. However, the company faces stiff competition from Adobe.
Adobe is now working on the fifth version of InDesign, which executives say will be available in spring of 2007. InDesign CS3 will offer some of the same features as XPress 7, including layer transparency, live text editing and the ability to place multiple images simultaneously, according to executives.
"Even if XPress 7 made coffee and cooked breakfast in the morning, nobody is going to switch back from InDesign," said Sandee Cohen, an author and industry consultant. According to Cohen, it's too expensive for companies to switch between layout programs, and then train the users on top of that.
To read about the public beta of Quark XPress 7, click here.
According to Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst with Jupitermedia, based in Darien, Conn., Adobe is in a better position to take advantage of the online facets of publishing.
"What Adobe has going for it is the change in the marketplace, how print has been affected by online," said Joe Wilcox. "Adobe is in a position, with the Macromedia merger, to capitalize on that. It's not just how the paper document is used anymore, but how the digital document is consumed."
Quark also faces adoption problems with previous customers. According to several sources, service bureaus routinely report they still receive files in Quark 4.1.
Die-hard Quark users will undoubtedly jump onto the new software. Small design shops and boutiques will find the new features a boon to their workflow. But enterprises will be more reluctant to change.
"By leaking that information about transparency in [InDesign] CS3 like they did," Cohen said, "Adobe is essentially saying to everybody, if you wait a year, we'll give you the same exact thing Quark is giving you now."
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