QuarkXPress 8
– Xperience Design with new tools and features!
After a wait of two years, Quark launched
QuarkXPress 8 deriving multi-city tours in India
with Heidelberg – Xperience Prepress! Quark
showed how designers get a new user experience
with features that allow QuarkXPress users to
create pages upto three times faster than previous
versions. Here is a brief.
Improved interface: QuarkXPress
8 has ‘improved the everyday
user experience’ with its refined
interface. It has a streamlined tools
palette, refined window design,
effective palette window grouping
abilities, some powerful workflow
enhancement, along with support
for drag-and-drop importing and
exporting. According to Denise
Duffy, Quark’s European PR
specialist, “One of the main things
Quark decided to concentrate on
with the development of
QuarkXPress 8 was how to enhance
usability and efficiency for regular
design and production needs.”
Quick access to tools: QuarkXPress
now uses single-key shortcuts (or
Hotkeys) for selecting tools. For the
tools that contain a pop-out menu
of options, hitting the shortcut key
repeatedly will cycle through the
available tools. There are now eight
icons in the Tools palette; six less
than before. The Content Selection
tool is also effectively split into two,
one for type and one for graphics.
Powerful typography control: One
of the features that grabs the
attention of type-aware designers
is the ability to set hanging
punctuation. Quotes and similar
punctuation characters can be set
to ‘hang’ partly off the edge of a
column of text in order to create
optically aligned rag.
Flash-adding video. |
Improved compatibility with
Photoshop and Illustrator:
QuarkXPress now allows import of
native Illustrator as well as native
Photoshop documents. Support for
native Photoshop file import isn’t
new to QuarkXPress 8, which gives
access to individual layers in a
Photoshop image, a feature that
surprisingly remains absent in
InDesign. The on-screen quality of
images and line art can be improved
with the Full Resolution Preview
turned on.
Faster layout creation: With
version 8 object handles are a little
larger. One can scale and rotate
images directly, independently of
their containing frames. And one
can do all this without the need to
switch tools.
Grids and guides: The new grid and
guides features in QuarkXPress 8
are jawd
roppingly
powerful and
comprehensive.
Grids are set
using grid
styles, the same
way one sets
type or object
styles. These
are applied
either directly to
master pages or
to individual
frames.
Interactive designer: Quark’s
Interactive designer is now built
into the core application. This
offers a large percentage of Flash’s
functionality in a manner that takes
just a small percentage of the effort.
The Item Find/Change feature is
another amazing feature, allowing
items to be found according to a
wide list of parameters – width,
location, fill, and dozens of
fine-grained attributes – and to
have those things changed
automatically as well if one wants.
Passport-free universal file
format: Anyone who works with
multiple-language documents and
anyone who has struggled with
opening a QuarkXPress Passport
document in a regular version of
QuarkXPress – will be delighted as
QuarkXPress Passport is no more
in the new version. Every copy of
QuarkXPress 8 will have full
multilingual type setting and
handling abilities as standard.
Thus, this release has changed
QuarkXPress from being something
of a 20th century throwback to a
forward-looking 21st century
product. With its unique features,
QuarkXPress 8 builds on being the
standard in the page layout industry
worldwide and in India.
QuarkXPress 8 now available in
India to revolutionise publishing
The next major release of the industry standard page-layout and
design software QuarkXPress 8 - which delivers a modern,
intuitive interface for faster design with fewer clicks, precise
typographic control, built-in flash authoring, and
global publishing capabilities - is now made
available to purchase directly from Quark India.
“We are excited to announce the broad availability
of QuarkXPress 8. This new version of our flagship
product raises the bar once again for page-layout
and design,” stated Gyan Prakash, vice president
of sales and marketing for Quark. “QuarkXPress
8 offers users advanced features and functionality
and increased productivity while maintaining
familiarity for long-time users. I encourage everyone to try QuarkXPress
8 with our 60-day Test Drive version,” he added further.
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