QuarkXPress 9 software for publishing

In February 2011, Quark announced the worldwide launch of QuarkXPress 9. The new version 9, will offer many enhanced features.

For example, it will maximise the impact of the creative content and businesses around digital workflow. According to Quark, the focus will be on systematic designing of personalised content and dynamic publishing.

One discernible gain is, Quark has incorporated smart behaviour in its tools giving more power to designers for creating high-fidelity design and allowing them to publish it in multiple-channels.

Akal Singh Sujlana, marketing manager for Asia at Quark India, says: "We will ensure that publishers, designers and marketers shall be able to create, deliver and optimise beautiful digital experiences across media and devices. QuarkXPress 9 will enable digital publishing on the web, ebooks, smart phones and iPads – using one single tool."

QuarkXPress 9 includes features like Blio export, epub Export, Linkster, ImageGrid, App Studio, Reflow View, Conditional Styles, Callouts, Bullets and Numbering, Breaking Anchored Tables, Cloner, Shape Maker, Style Sheet Enhancements, Story Editor, Lock Proportions and XLSX import.

App Studio: a unique feature
According to Quark, designing and publishing the interactive content to the iPad is now possible with the use of App Studio, a unique feature in QuarkXPress 9.

Creating a custom iPad app with Quark’s online service, then designing and publishing interactive content is possible without requiring the services of a programmer.

Sujlana says: "Only QuarkXPress 9 lets designers use a dedicated workspace with familiar tools to convert existing layouts to rich, interactive content — or create new iPad content from scratch and then sell that content through the Apple App Store.

With the help of this feature, layouts can be created using the dedicated vertical and horizontal orientations simultaneously. This feature automatically builds slideshows, video and sound players, pop-up windows, web overlays, hyperlinks and scrollable layouts.

Publishing to the Blio eReader
With QuarkXPress 9 it is easy to create richly designed, interactive ebooks and make them available to the audience through a worldwide online bookstore, regardless of the device they use.

According to Quark, the Blio eReader is widely accessible and a versatile eReader.

Sujlana says: "Blio allows user the advantage of design control in QuarkXPress. Much more than a simple text reader, the Blio eReader can display richly designed publications with interactive multimedia such as slideshows, video, and even content from the web pages and embedded HTML."

He adds: "When the book is ready to be published, it can be given to the Blio bookstore which is backed by Baker & Taylor, one of the world’s largest distributors of physical and digital books. So, readers can buy books on the device they prefer. They can even move between devices to read ebooks, picking up where they left off by using the sync feature built into the Blio eReader."

Export to ePub
With the QuarkXPress 9 ePub Export feature, print files can be easily converted into well-structured, reflowable ebooks for popular reading devices such as the iPad, Sony Reader, and Nook, or submit to Amazon for Kindle.

To extract text and pictures from the QuarkXPress layout and turn them into text and picture components, Reflow view is used. It is then ordered and tagged for consistent display in any ebook reader that supports the ePub standard.

Design driven automation
Conditional styles (sometimes referred to as "nested styles") take the tedium out of text styling rules. Through an intuitive, "plain English" user interface, a set of rules can be created that automatically applies paragraph and character style sheets to the text, based on the content of that text and the rules that have been defined.

This eliminates text-styling inconsistencies and saves countless hours of manual work. The bullet, numbering, and outline styles feature, enables the content to be easily created and maintained.

Instead of manually inserting bullets and numbers and manually formatting paragraphs to accommodate them, the feature can simply choose a bullet or numbering style from a drop-down menu.

Instead of manually adjusting indents in a multi-level outline, the indents can be changed at the click of a button without creating local formatting. And instead of manually maintaining the numbering for a list, QuarkXPress 9 can do the job for the operator.

With the callouts feature, 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 helps in easily creating or modifying hard-to-draw shapes such as waves, polygons, stars, and spirals, ShapeMaker also allows designers to create unique corner effects.
ImageGrid allows designers to import and automatically build grids of images with a variety of layout options; also supports image captioning.

Linkster, this feature enables designers to 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.

Story Editor provides a word-processor-like view within QuarkXPress 9, which is most helpful when text within a layout is difficult to read and when reviewing stories that span multiple pages.

Then there is the Cloner. The cloner is the feature which allows the smartest and most efficient way to clone design elements. Cloner allows designers to copy items or pages to other pages or layouts and can be used to combine layouts or split them apart.

Availability and pricing
According to Sujlana, QuarkXPress 9 will be available from April 2011 and the price will match the current price of QuarkXPress 8 which is Rs 37,000 for a full product license and Rs 16,000 for upgrades from the older versions of QuarkXPress.

Sujlana says: "It will be available through authorised Quark resellers and directly from Quark. Anyone who purchases or upgrades to QuarkXPress 8 at the regular price is eligible to upgrade to QuarkXPress 9 for free. In addition, any customer who has purchased QuarkXPress 8 between 1 January, 2011 and 23 February, 2011 is entitled to a complimentary upgrade to QuarkXPress 9."

App Studio for QuarkXPress
App Studio for QuarkXPress 9 will be made available for free within 90 days of the availability. For designers interested in iPad publishing, Quark is offering an iPad Publishing Service for QuarkXPress 9 in which Quark will configure a starter iPad app with customer’s logos and colours and enable the enrichment of QuarkXPress content, which can then be published to that app.

Users of the service will be able to migrate to QuarkXPress 9 for iPad publishing once App Studio for QuarkXPress is released. Quite  clearly, the ninth version has arrived on the scene.