Quark took attendees of the Total Publishing expo through a “whistle-stop tour” of QuarkXPress 5, according to Macworld UK . Total Publishing is the exhibition dedicated to the UK publishing industry.
Brett Mueller, Quark’s senior product manager for desktop products, also said that the company is creating a Mac OS X version of the publishing application. However, no timetable was given and Quark takes a long time between product updates.
Version 5 won’t be Carbonized. Earlier this year Glen Turpin, Quark’s corporate communications manager, said that, “by the time we got a really good build of OS X, we were already engineering complete on 5.0 and had begun testing.”
“Going back to create a Carbonized version would have put us way behind schedule,” he added. Quark 5 will run in OS X’s Classic environment — which means it won’t take advantage of OS X’s modern OS features — and a future version will run natively under OS X, Turpin said.
Turpin added that QuarkXPress 5 would run only on Power Macs. “That was a tough decision for us,” he said, since a large portion of Quark’s customers still use older 68K machines. He noted that a native OS X version of QuarkXPress would have even more-stringent hardware requirements, since OS X will run only on G3 and G4 systems released after September 1998.
Mueller said that XPress 5 would be “bug-free” and fit into Quark’s vision of publishing: to “print, Web, PDAs, mobile phones, and beyond,” according to Macworld UK. Quark 5 will offer a new feature called “layers,” which brings XPress into line with most current graphics and layout software. It will also be more Web-savvy, with a new Placeholders menus allowing Web pages developed in version 5 to accept XML (Extensible Markup Language) data in single-click, drag-&-drop fashion. When a page is Saved for Web, XPress 5 automatically transforms TIFFs into JPEGs or GIFs.
Another XPress 5 Web feature is its ability to create rollovers and attach hyperlinks. It also now supports SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and AppleScript. Macworld UK said that existing features have also been improved. Collect for Output now collects color profiles, and screen and printer fonts, not just images. The Save As feature also gives users the option to assign color profiles, document-bleed settings, and document types.
Mueller also pointed out that Quark is working on an Import module, to allow the importation of Excel documents. “It’s still in development and will be released later,” he said.