With the release of Quark XPress for Mac OS X it would seem it is only a matter of time for all to take up that system. By Andy Benedek.

　　So Quark XPress for Mac OS X has arrived. As the last major application to be released in a version compatible with Mac OS X, it has been long awaited. Apple has repeatedly held that the modest take up of Mac OS X by professional users has been due to Quark's tardiness in this matter ­ all of which begs the question as to whether its release will trigger a mass migration to Mac OS X.

　　When one recalls the history surrounding Quark's upgrades to XPress, some doubt is justified. The introduction of versions 3 and 4 were marred by the successive release of numerous minor upgrades, each of which was an attempt to eliminate numerous bugs.

　　Proved to be lacklustre

　　V4 came quite some years after V3 but in spite of this, take up was very slow. Quark had to resort to the tactic of refusing to offer technical support for V3 in order to force the adoption of V4. V5 of XPress also proved to be lacklustre because it was characterised by a few, relatively unattractive, improvements.

　　It is thus possible to surmise that unless V6 of XPress has some really 'must have' new functions, take up will be slight. The mere fact that it is Mac OS X compatible may prove to be an insufficient reason to upgrade. Users desperate for a page layout application to run under Mac OS X may well have already switched to the much improved V2 of Adobe InDesign.

　　Are the improvements and additions to V6 desirable enough to tempt users to change both their operating system and their version of XPress? That depends upon individual requirements.

　　With the launch of Mac OS X2, plus the updates to X2.6, the stability and speed of Mac OS X is now much less of an issue. Instead, it is down to whether V6 of XPress is attractive enough in itself or whether a move to Mac OS X is necessary for other reasons.

　　Many and varied

　　So what are the new features of XPress V6? Well, they are many and varied ­ aside from Mac OS X support. Foremost of the new features is the change to the structure of documents. Now, documents, or project files as they are called, can contain a number of different layouts which may be either print optimised or web optimised layouts, or a combination of the two.

　　Prior to V6 of XPress, documents could contain only one page size but the layouts in a project file may have different page sizes and shapes. Take, for example, a print-based project file for corporate stationery. This could include layouts for headed notepaper, envelopes, compliment slips and business cards.

　　Taking advantage

　　As these layouts share the same basic text of company name, address, telephone numbers, etc, advantage can be taken of another feature new to XPress, namely Synchronise Text. Invoking this ensures that changes to the text in one layout are reflected in the other layouts.

　　If there has been one function uppermost in most XPress user's wish lists, it is that of multiple undos. This feature has at last been added to XPress and implemented in a manner similar to the History palette in Adobe Photoshop. This enables users to step back and forth through the changes to a project, undoing and re-doing changes at the click of a mouse. In previous versions of XPress, both pixel- and vector-based images, when placed in documents, appeared, on screen, at low resolution making their accurate placement rather difficult. At last, the option to view such images at high resolution has now been provided making both placement and clipping mask creation much easier.

　　Quark's chagrin

　　It is to Quark's chagrin that XPress has lacked a powerful table creation/editing tool until now. PageMaker has had one for more than ten years, but similar capabilities have only been available to XPress users thanks to third party developers of XTensions.

　　All that is now in the past as a creditable table designer and editor has been added to XPress V6 which allows, among other things, text cells to be linked to one another, or to any text box in a layout, such that text can be flowed through them, and ­ at long last ­ gridlines can be rendered invisible.

　　Godsend

　　Layers are a godsend to designers of documents with content-rich pages and so their enhanced capabilities in V6 are very welcome. Take the fact that layers can now be truly locked such that absolutely no changes can be made to the items on them and, conversely, when layers are unlocked, their entire contents can be selected enabling global changes to be made with ease.

　　XPress' colour capabilities have also received some attention in the form of As Is and DeviceN colour. These enable documents to be sent to a Postscript Rip as composite colour rather than as separations created by XPress. As Is colour leaves the colours in their original space whilst DeviceN includes both composite colour and separation data for In-Rip separations. DeviceN can also be applied to EPS and PDF files saved from Quark XPress.

　　Another long awaited capability is the ability to save documents in Adobe's PDF format. V5 went a little way towards easing this task, but Adobe's Distiller application was still required. In V6 of XPress, PDF file creation is a much simplified task. PDFs can now be created with complete control over image compression and font embedding/subsetting, both of which are essential for professional use.

　　The much improved ability of XPress V6 to save documents in PDF format is thus most welcome. But what is unwelcome, however, is that documents can only be saved in V5 and V6 formats. V6 can open V3 documents, so there is no technical reason for the unnecessary hobbling of V6.

　　Those V4 users who resisted the upgrade to V5 are faced with a real problem if they want to move documents back and forth between networked computers running versions 4 and 6 of XPress.

　　Of course, some of the new features present in V6 documents are lost when saving in V4 or V5 format, but such losses are understood and can often be compensated for.

　　Surprisingly, support for OpenType features is also lacking in V6. Whilst installed OpenType fonts appear in the menu and can be used as with standard Postscript Type 1 fonts, features in OpenType fonts such as the automatic substitution of ligatures, small caps, fractions, non-lining numerals, alternative characters, etc cannot be used.

　　Quality of typography

　　In fact, the quality of typography in Xpress V6 is no better than that in say V3 and is way behind that of Adobe's InDesign, as XPress still breaks lines in justified text on a line by line basis instead of the per paragraph basis. Suffice it to say that if typographic excellence is of prime importance to you, then InDesign is your page layout application.

　　Mention of an improved interface in software updates can often bring shudders of apprehension to seasoned users because of the need to re-learn ingrained working methods. XPress V6 does have a few changes to the interface, but even the Mac OS X version ­ with its need to conform to that operating system's requirements ­ is quite familiar to V4 and V5 users.

　　One last feature to have changed with V6 is that of copy protection.V4 and V5 of XPress were protected by the use of a dongle, a small hardware device which plugged into an ADB, or more recently, a USB port. V6 uses a different method of protection which involves activating the application.

　　Activation is effected by a phone call or via the web. It is not the same as registration as that has to be done as well. If XPress is not activated within five days of installation, it becomes a demo version, unable to save documents. Activation is then required to return XPress to a full working version.

　　So is it worth upgrading to V6? Against is cost as the list price of V6 is £1,095, with an upgrade costing £199 from V5 and £299 from V4. Adobe InDesign is less than half the price. In favour of such a move are the new features which clearly indicate that V6 is not just a rewrite of V5 to run under Mac OS X.

　　Dwindling support

　　These, plus Apple's dwindling support for Mac OS 9 and Adobe's stated intention of only releasing Mac OS X versions of the forthcoming updates to Photoshop and Illustrator mean that a move to Mac OS X is only a matter of time.

　　Nobody likes being presented with a fait accompli but that is the way it is. So I suggest you reconcile yourself to the fact.

　　Quark attempts web feat

　　Quark's attempts at persuading web designers to use XPress for creating websites, have, over the years been somewhat less than successful.

　　Despite much development and expense, Quark Immedia bit the dust and later versions of XPress failed to excite website designers into much of a frenzy for many reasons including the sparsity of web tools, the absence of website management tools and the inability to import exported HTML.

　　As a consequence, one is left wondering whether Quark is flogging a dead horse in still pursuing this tack. Be that as it may, Quark has improved XPress' web creation capabilities yet again by enhancing XML handling, through an improved interface and more comprehensive placeholder capabilities, and added some new features of which 'cascading menus' are the most eye-catching.

　　Cascading menus enable menus of items to remain hidden from view until browsers pass the mouse over hot spots on the page.

　　Font families enables web page designers to better control the appearance of web pages when specified fonts are unavailable by allowing them to designate alternative fonts to be used in their stead.

　　Two position rollovers ­ as opposed to the basic rollovers provided in V5 ­ can now be added to web pages, enabling separate origin and target boxes to be specified and thus greater design freedom. Forms can also be created with greater ease in V6.

[时间：2003-12-22  作者：Bisenet  来源：Bisenet]