Quark revs up its graphics engine with a new inside and out, QuarkXPress10

Besides, Quark has also announced a special 20 percent discount offer to its existing QuarkXPress 9 user on pre-orders of QuarkXPress 10

The new graphics engine will continue to support ePub and out-of-the-box HTML5 authoring tools for App Studio™, the leading cloud-based HTML5 solution for creating award-winning tablet and smartphone experiences. 

“The team has been working on many aspects of the version 10 release for several years. The vital changes in terms of application environment, architecture, user interface, and graphics engine create a fantastic base upon which we can move QuarkXPress into the future. Now users can rely on a single integrated design tool for publishing professional print as well as enabling printers to extend their services into digital publishing to devices such as the iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire and Android tablets and smartphones,” said Gavin Drake, vice president of marketing at Quark.

“We are excited to make the software available to the Indian market, to enable everyone from individual designers and small businesses through to large publishers and corporates to create highly engaging and richly designed content for their customers,” added Drake.

In India, QuarkXPress is used by thousands of printers, publishers and corporates.

QuarkXPress 10 marks its entry to using Apple’s Cocoa API, instead of Carbon (Apple’s C-based application programming interface). With the market increasingly moving to the Cocoa-based frameworks, after Apple discontinued creating a version of Carbon while updating their other frameworks in the 2007 time-frame, Adobe in 2010 updated its Photoshop to Cocoa.

Like Adobe, while migrating to Cocoa, Quark’s development team, which had to start afresh, updated half a million lines of code, created more than 500 dialogues and palettes in multiple languages, and incorporated 1,300 icons to enable Retina display resolutions. “Cocoa is the current and preeminent application environment for Mac OS X. Being a Cocoa app brings a number of benefits to QuarkXPress 10, including the ability to leverage the latest OS X features, maximise performance, and rapidly support new OS X releases,” said Dave White, CTO at Quark.

With the new Xenon graphic engine, Quark has engineered what it calls, a new, state-of-the-art graphics engine from the ground up that will be leveraged across a range of its products, starting with the latest launch. 

“The native and deep understanding of image and vector files; Xenon’s ability to take full advantage of the latest processor technology, reflects in the stunning difference between viewing pixel and vector files in QuarkXPress 10 versus QuarkXPress 9 is stunning,” added Drake. 

There are modern interfaces that optimize the design environment – from expanding the design environment to fill the entire screen with one click, palettes with auto-hide functionality, drag and drop, to remembering your favourite configuration. Among other new features include word and Asian language support and QR Code Creator.

QuarkXPress 10 will be available in late August.