Tag Archives: page layout

QuarkXPress 9.0 Announced

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Quark today announced a major upgrade to its print/digital publishing application. Slated to ship in April, QuarkXPress 9.0 provides a number of new features and updates, particularly in the area of creating and publishing digital media for e-readers, smartphones, the Apple iPad, plus other tablet devices.

For print producers, version 9 finally adds long-missing features, including a Story Editor and Bulleted/Numbered Lists.

Click thumb for larger image

The new App Studio feature enables designers to create customized apps for the iPad, distribute their apps through the Apple App Store, and then publish richly designed, interactive content to the app. Designers can repurpose existing content or create the digital media from scratch.

Two new modules allow producers to create eBooks in both ePub – the open ebook standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum and compatible with Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble NOOK, and Amazon Kindle formats – as well as the proprietary Blio format.

Other new features include:

  • Conditional Styles: Allows designers to automatically style content based on a series of styling rules.
  • Callouts: Boxes and groups move automatically with text as determined by the designer. Callouts can be positioned relative to the page, spread, text box, paragraph, or character.
  • ShapeMaker: A wizard for creating complex shapes such as waves, polygons, stars,  spirals, and unique corner effects.
  • ImageGrid: Allows designers to create contact sheets and similar content y importing and automatically building grids of images with a variety of layout options. Also supports image captioning.
  • Linkster: Unlink and relink text boxes that already contain text, to unlink stories spanning multiple pages, and to link or unlink boxes without disrupting existing text.
  • Cloner: Allows designers to copy items or pages to other pages or layouts and can be used to combine layouts or split them apart.

QuarkXPress 9 will ship in April at the list price of $799.00. Owners of  QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 are eligible to purchase an upgrade for $299.00. Also, any purchase of QuarkXpress 8 (current version 8.5) from today through April 30 will receive version QuarkXPress 9 at no additional charge via download. Retail box copies will incur a shipping/handling charge. (Good way for owners of version 6 to catch up).

Mac installations of QuarkXPress 9 will require units with an Intel processor running Mac OS X 10.5.8 or above.

Adobe updates InDesign CS4

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Adobe has released InDesign CS4 6.0.1 – an update to its page composition/layout program. The 33 Mb patch addresses a number of issues, including:

  • No longer unexpectedly quits when joining two points with the pen tool.
  • No longer unexpectedly quits when Shift-Cmd-double-clicking to override a master page text frame containing text.
  • Now correctly updates the links in documents with a large number of placed InDesign files.
  • When exporting to SWF, InDesign now correctly page turns right-to-left bound documents and correctly exports “mailto:” links have “http://”  links.
  • Now correctly exports to PDF InDesign documents with very large images with a high effective resolutions.
  • No longer loses stroke settings for merged table cells when opening an INX file created in InDesign CS3 or earlier.
  • Now correctly converts InDesign CS3 documents which previously caused inaccurate reflow due to hyphenation limits.

Quark ships XPress 8

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QuarkXPress 8 is scheduled for August release

Quark, Inc. is now shipping Quark XPress 8.

Although the new version does not boast many new features, Quark XPress 8 incorporates a vastly updated interface “to allow users to do more with fewer clicks” – including the use of more standardized keyboard shortcuts for better workflow between applications. Also new is drag-and-drop support for images stored on the Desktop, Adobe Bridge, iPhoto, and other applications. You can also drag and drop content from QuarkXPress to Photoshop, Illustrator, Microsoft Word and other applications for direct editing. Improved Flash tools are also included.

Full retail price for Quark XPress 8 is $799.00 (currently $779.98 from MacMall), upgrades are listed at $299.00 ($292.99 from MacMall). In addition, anyone who purchased a full copy or upgrade of Quark XPress 7 from May 1 – August 1, 2008 is qualified to upgrade to XPress 8 for just a shipping and handling charge.