macnn
07/31/2008, 11:40am, EDT
Thursday, July 31st
Quark ships QuarkXPress 8
Following the debut in May, Quark now says that QuarkXPress 8 is finally shipping. The company's flagship publishing software has had a number of major changes implemented, most notably new picture editing tools. Images can now be scaled and rotated in real-time -- without switching tools or entering measurements -- and a new Bézier pen has been added, allowing drawing without an outside application.
Files from other apps or the desktop can be dragged directly into QXP, and the interface has been enhanced with buttons for master pages and exporting to various formats. Among these are Flash and HTML, as the software has been given new tools for converting print material into web media.
The full version of QuarkXPress costs $800, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 along with 1GB of RAM. Upgrades are priced at $300, and the company is additionally providing a free trial version that operates for 60 days.
Filed under: software, Graphics/Web Design
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woo hoo
This is like announcing you are updating dogshit. Please, please make this the last version of this piece of crap that screwed us for YEARS, and die a quick death after.
Doofuses.
robttwo being forced?
are you being forced to use Quark XPress? Seems like it took Adobe a long time to bury PageMaker, and a few still use it. In that timeframe, before ID was really off the ground, and PM was suffering a lingering death, XPress was a useful layout tool.
Quark was very quick with an Intel version of XPress. Any time Quark makes an announcement, I can count the seconds until someone bashes it, even though they probably haven't used XPress since a few versions past.
We're still using XPress where I work. Nobody here has suffered your apparent agony because of it. It does the job fine, is AppleScriptable, and version 7 rarely hangs. I use ID3 occasionally, when it's a better tool for a particular job. It's also a nice program. Since most all our current assets, and employee experience, is in XPress, we'll continue to use it. Despite the vitriol of some vocal people who really don't add anything but flames to the discussion.
sorry tindrum
i agree with robttwo.
quark should be put down like a sick dog for its previous actions.
Same here
Although I am very curious about Quark 8 (downloading demo), this new version is going to have to deliver. Quark was great, but compared to what? Freehand and Pagemaker? It was trimmed to do what it was suppose to do, but sat on its laurels.
Along comes InDesign, implements the Adobe functions we all come to love from Illustrator and Photoshop. I can sit here and list all the little nuances that make InDesign better than Quark, but who's mind will that change. I can suggest that what will at least get Quark back to toleration is better PDF generation, better keyboard shortcuts, font management, bounding box control, stylesheets for everything, dynamic spelling and print options. That's off the top of my head.
I too still use Quark because a few clients still insist on it. Strange, it's not because THEY use it.
The Longest Death Ever...
Quark is like some old lady in an Eastern European village somewhere... She'll live to be 109, but no one knows who she is or what she does. And no one remembers that a really long time ago she was very helpful and the best in her field, until she became antiquated and was obsoleted by others with newer methods and better technology. Occasionally, few may seek her out for stories of the past, but most have long forgotten her.
kdogg73 makes good points
The rest of you are just making analogy or ad hominem arguments. For new people learning or just starting, ID is great because it shares UI commonalities with PS and Illustrator. It can do some things better than XPress. It comes free with what you're probably going to buy anyway, PShop and Illustrator.None of this negates the usefulness of XPress for people who have hundreds or thousands of existing jobs made in XPress, and who's experience is almost exclusively in XPress.I'm not even trying to say XPress is better than ID. I am saying it has usefulness, and that when people bash XPress, they are probably just considering their own narrow experience and circle of peers, and not the whole.
plugins
Who cares if they have put out a new version of Quark if none of the plugins will work for it. Ones like PMP, AdDesign, etc. That was the limiting factor at my last place from moving ahead the most. If you can't get your adds or articles into the document, what's the point of the rest of it working?
:)
:) There I closed that italics tag that kdogg left open.
And yet
QuarkExpress is supposedly written in Cocoa, which means it takes advantage of all the 64-bit goodness that Leopard offers, not to mention the multi-core stupidly-named "Grand Central" goodness of Snow Leopard, as opposed to Adobe and InDesign, which is using the deprecated Carbon.
But let's forget all the trash that Adobe got when it was found out that it was still using Carbon, that they'd have to do the whole re-write thing, and the next version will probably take many years to come out.