What is QuarkXPress 4/Passport 4 and updates?

After years (and years) Quark finally released version 4.0 of its industry-leading page layout program, QuarkXPress. Designers and publishers should take a moment to scream "hurrah!" Quark 4.0 is one great app.

There are many reasons to rejoice — some 80 new reasons in all. Some are big and splashy, others small and easily overlooked; and a few will require some work before they become truly useful. But enough posturing, let’s get to the goods. Here’s what Quark took so long to do.

In one of its biggest improvements, QuarkXPress 4.0 features Bezier drawing tools. If you’ve used Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand, these additions will be old friends. Shapes can be drawn point by point or freehand. Via modifier keys, you can add and delete points, and pause to edit paths while still actively drawing them. These new drawing features can work in conjunction with QuarkXPress’ new Merge commands to quickly create complex shapes (see “Divide and Conquer,” p51).

Version 4.0 also brings the Text to Box feature, allowing the conversion of selected text into shapes editable with the Bezier tool. By default, the text becomes a picture box, but you can change the box into a text box (another new feature) and actually type text within text. Once converted, the type is no longer editable as text, but it can have separate fill and frame colors, and its Bezier segments and points can be altered (see “Merge Mania,” p52). These nonrectangular boxes can be anchored into a text flow — very nice because in previous versions, anchored boxes had to be rectangular.

Another superhelpful QuarkXPress 4.0 feature is the ability to create new or to adjust existing clipping paths. In earlier ersions, you were forced to switch to and from Adobe Photoshop when working with paths. QuarkXPress 4.0 not only creates paths, it reads paths saved in Photoshop files, and, if more than one was saved, it allows you to choose which path will clip the image.

A third great addition to QuarkXPress’ arsenal is the ability to set text on a path. This feature gives versatility in placing text and even allows text paths to be part of linked text chains.

Slightly less glamorous but still great is the program’s new tool for working with long documents: the Book feature. This tool might be overlooked by those who don’t produce books, catalogs, magazines, or other multichapter documents, but if you regularly create documents that must all use the same style sheets, H&J settings, colors, lists, and dashes and stripes, you’ll want to check it out. With the Book feature, you can specify one document to be a Master Chapter and synchronize all other documents in your “book” to match its settings.

Quark has made many other, more subtle additions. Dashes & Stripes may not sound particularly exciting, but it’s wonderful for anyone who has ever wanted to have a real, non-bitmapped coupon frame or for those who have wished to create their own striped or dashed rules and frames. Also, when specifying a frame, you now can specify a color for the gap (the white or transparent portions between frame lines or dash segments) as well as for the solid part of the frame or rule style.

Resizing grouped items no longer requires the aid of a QuarkXTension. Commercial, third-party QuarkXTensions give a great deal more control, especially over the resizing of item contents, but this new feature will be a big boon to many users. Hopefully, Quark will add better content resizing control in a future version.

The company also enhanced Color features by adding support for Apple’s ColorSync, high-fidelity Hexachrome color, and the ability to create multi-ink colors. The last item is something that longtime designers used to do regularly in the ages B.C. (before computers). Overprint two or more spot colors, and you create the illusion of printing with more colors (a trick for tight print budgets and a fun, creative challenge). Yes, there are workarounds for achieving the effect without version 4.0’s multi-ink ability, but they’re not WYSIWYG and hardly could be classified as fun.

Lists and Index features now are part of QuarkXPress. The lists feature allows compiling lists of text tagged with a specific style sheet, handy for (among other things) creating a table of contents. The Index feature, while welcome, is weak; we hope to see improvement in later program versions. It requires more manual work than more-powerful, third-party indexing QuarkXTensions.

QuarkXPress 4.0 takes page layout software a step forward. The creative folk in the crowd definitely will benefit from its new graphics-related features. They’ll see much less interruption in their workflow and will make fewer trips to assorted graphics programs just to create a basic type effect or to silhouette a photo. A handful of new features are not yet what they should be, and some of the program’s default settings remain less than intuitive, but even the clunky features show promise, and you can always set your own defaults. The program is stable — we experienced no quits, bombs, or freezes (remarkable, considering all the new features and for the program being a “.0” version). We saw the occasional, minor screen redraw glitch, but we easily remedied it by pressing Command-Option-. (period), to force redraw, which is another new feature, or by toggling Guides on and off via the F7 key. Version 4.0 was worth the wait.

Chapman, Elyse. (March 1998). QuarkXPress 4.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 50-52).

Download QuarkXPress 4/Passport 4 and updates for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.1

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver