Quark, Inc., the venerable page-layout software developer and longtime Adobe nemesis, has announced in conjunction with Global Graphics that the company has licensed Global's eDocument Library for integration in future versions of XPress.

Previously, Quark had licensed the Jaws PDF Library, which enabled PDF export for prepress files, thus giving XPress users the ability to generate high-quality, prepress-ready PDFs from within QuarkXPress without having to purchase Acrobat. This upgrade, in layman's terms, throws open the door for Quark, among other things—keep in mind nothing's been formally announced yet—to offer XPS import and export in its popular page-layout application, among other things.

Global Graphics chief technology officer Martin Bailey says that there hasn't been a whole lot of call for XPS in the prepress world yet, but the Microsoft PDF alternative (developed with Global Graphics as a consultant) will likely pop up on printers' radar in coming years as more and more people migrate to Windows Vista and beyond.

That will leave printers with a dilemma, Bailey says: Process XPS files natively or convert them to PDF at some point in the workflow, both of which have their potential pitfalls, the latter "an accident waiting to happen," as he puts it. 

Read the rest of this article on PDFzone.com.