With its third incarnation, QuarkXPress has finally left behind its once-justified reputation as a powerful-but-daunting desktop-publishing program that made you play by its own rules — or else. In completely rewriting the program. Quark has done more than just incorporating some of the enhancements users have been clamoring for and smoothing some of the more notorious rough spots. Version 3.0 bristles with wonderful new features, and the interface has been brilliantly redesigned.
You Asked for It. First, here's a look at how some of the major complaints about earlier versions have been addressed. QuarkXPress' default pages were always a poor substitute for real master pages. Now you can have as many as 127 different retroactive master pages per document. You can easily change the master page that applies to a particular page simply by dragging icons inside the new document-layout palette, which gives an iconic view of every page and master page in a document. When you change a master page, all the changes are reflected in every page based on that master. If you apply a new master page, the document pages instantly change to reflect the new master.
The edge of each page is no longer the impenetrable boundary it once was. You can drag objects completely off a page and use the space outside the page as a pasteboard much like PageMaker's. You can also drag objects partially off pages to create bleeds, another former near impossibility. You can even create objects that stretch across multipage spreads.
You're no longer confined to using cumbersome parent/child boxes when you want to associate objects permanently. You can now select and permanently group multiple objects with the standard Shift-click command or by using the marquee tool. Although the parent/childbox arrangement is still available, users can opt to use the more flexible — and less confusing — option of permanently grouping objects as necessary.
QuarkXPress now lets you rotate any object or group (either text or graphic) in increments as fine as .001 degree, either by using the mouse with a new rotation tool or by typing the exact amount of rotation you want.
Improved Interface. QuarkXPress 3.0’s thoroughly revamped interface makes it a joy to use. The tool palette is no longer attached to the left side of every window but now floats above the page. There are three new tools — for rotating objects, creating irregularly shaped picture boxes, and zooming the page image with a magnifying glass. In a welcome touch, you can drag the magnifying glass over a displayed page to exactly select the area to be shown when the page is zoomed. Double-clicking on most tools lets you customize their defaults.
At the heart of QuarkXPress’ new look is the floating measurements palette. It displays information about any selected object, such as x,y coordinates, overall measurements, the amount of rotation, the fonts used, and so on. These numbers aren't a static display. You can click in any box and type in new information, and the selected object instantly changes accordingly. This is a great way to modify objects quickly, because you can use the palette to simultaneously modify all the objects in a multiple selection.
Quark has made things even quicker with some clever shortcuts. There's a pop-up font menu when text is selected, for example, but you don’t have to scroll to find and change fonts. You can simply begin typing the name of the new font into the field next to the menu. As soon as you’ve typed enough characters to identify a font, the entire font name appears.
Page Management. You can have as many as seven files open simultaneously, and if you want to move objects from one document to another, you simply select and drag whatever objects you want from one document window to another. In the Thumbnails mode, you can drag entire pages between documents.
You can also drag objects into a library palette. Library files are collections of objects — including entire pages or master pages — displayed in reduced view. You can save any object in a library and then retrieve it by simply dragging a copy of it from the library onto a new page.
In addition to managing master pages, the document-layout palatte lets you rearrange pages by copying, pasting, and deleting them or by dragging their icons. You can easily create mulltpage spreads by dragging the page icons into the spread; you can then display and work on the entire spread as if it were one page.
Not only can you make multiple selections and create groups, but there’s also a Space/Align command that lets you align or distribute multiple objects. Tills makes it a snap to create tables from multiple text boxes, for example, while making certain that all the rows and columns align properly.
The Winning Type. Although version 3.0 still doesn't have all the features professional typographers might want (such as hanging punctuation or adjustable underscores), QuarkXPress maintains its undisputed lead as the best DTP program for handling type. The program now lets you define the proportions and offsets of superscripts, subscripts, small capitals, and superior type. There are several new paragraph options: You can create anchored rules above or below any paragraph, as we11 as create automatic drop caps and have some amount of widow and orphan control. You can also anchor any object — text, graphic, or group — to text, simply by pasting the object into a text column.
QuarkXPress now also supports vertical text alignment within any text box: Text can be centered, justified, or aligned to the top or bottom within a box. You can also specify the exact amount of space between the top of a text box and the baseline of the first line of text.
As with type, QuarkXPress 3.0's handling of words has been beefed up. The fast spelling checker and the powerful global search-and-replace (it finds and changes text attributes as well as strings of text) can now examine all the text in a document in a single pass. There are also three new special characters: an “indent here” character, which lets you quickly indent a paragraph to the character's location; a discretionary-new-line character, which lets a word break at the end of a line without inserting a hyphen; and a nonbreaking em dash.
Style Problem. QuarkXPress' handling of style sheets hasn’t benefited from 3.0’s jazzy interface changes. As in previous versions, the sheets sometimes behave erratically. When you change a style, for example, the text formatting doesn't always automatically change to reflect the new style sheet, which forces you to go to the new style via No Style on the Style Sheet command. This procedure makes you lose any local formatting exceptions you may have applied to the text in a paragraph. Someday the excitement of QuarkXPress' style sheets should come from their power and speed, not their unpredictability.
Pictures Perfect. Although QuarkXPress still can't separate color TIFF images, there are several handy enhancements to the program’s picture handling. You can now create polygonal graphic boxes of any shape by adding and moving points. You can create manual text runarounds for pictures. One neat trick, for example, is to create an inverted runaround that forces the text behind the picture box to flow inside the runaround you've drawn, making it easy to create star bursts and other text effects.
QuarkXPress was the first desklop-publishing program to do true process- color separations. It continues its lead in color-handling by letting you specify custom color choking and spreading information for each color in a document.
The bottom Line. Aside from indexing and creating tables of contents, there is very little that PageMaker 4.0 can do that QuarkXPress 3.0 can’t, and QuarkXPress far outpaces its rival in most other areas. This release also contains excellent documentation that is a great help in getting the most from this rich program.
Like many other high-ticket programs, QuarkXPress 3.0 checks networks for multiple copies of the same serial number. Version 3.0 won't launch if it detects a copy with the same number already active on a network.
QuarkXPress 3.0 is by far the finest Mac desktop-publishing program available. It sets a new standard in DTP.
Taub, Eric. (November 1990). QuarkXPress. MacUser. (pgs. 52-53).
Quark, Inc.
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QUARK_3_0.SIT
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2020-09-14 / 
bda0784025cee63655c64c058ada54046afd03c7 / 
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
