Quark also announced that QuarkXPress 7 will run natively on Intel and Power PC-based Macs.Desktop publishing software maker Quark announced today the availability of the QuarkXPress 7 public beta.
A pre-release version of the software, which runs on both PCs and Macs, can be downloaded from the Quark Web site.
A beta universal binary, which runs on Intel and Power PC-based Macs, is planned for the end of January.
The full release of the software is planned for the second quarter of 2006.
Quark announced that the full version of QuarkXPress will run natively on both chip sets as well.
"We've been doing extensive pre-release testing already," said Richard Paselwark, vice president of sales for the Americas. "The public beta is to ensure that quality is where people expect it."
Quark was pilloried last year for allowing Adobe to catch up to—and some say surpass—Quark with its software, InDesign.
Quark has been touting several features of XPress 7, including its "Job Jacket" technology.
According to Quark, a Job Jacket can automate a host of areas within a given job's scope, such as the type of printer used, the print-output specifications and the color specifications.
Quark has also said that XPress 7 will embrace XML-based PPML (personalized print markup language).
"PPML serves as a template data source, allowing for different iterations of [a document's] pages," said Hans Hartman, desktop product marketing manager at Quark, in an interview with Publish.com last year.
"If you are creating a customized real estate brochure for 1,500 people, you can now create a single XPress file instead of having to create 1,500 different pages because the XML data [from the PPML file] is merged into the document."
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