Quark announces QuarkXPress 9
Quark has announced QuarkXPress 9, which will allow designers to publish directly to digital devices and increase their productivity with new features for design automation.
QuarkXPress 9 ups the ante on digital publishing by offering designers a flexible and cost-effective array of options for creating content directly from QuarkXPress to the iPad, to an e-book, or through the Blio eReader.
App Studio for QuarkXPress is a dedicated design environment within QuarkXPress 9 for creating content for the iPad. Designers will be able to create customised apps for the iPad, distribute their apps through the Apple App Store, and then publish richly designed, interactive content to the app. QuarkXPress 9 will allow designers to repurpose existing content or to design content specifically for the iPad that includes video/audio players, slideshows, scrollable regions, Web overlays, pop-up windows, buttons, and hyperlinks. A pricing structure will be in place for publishing commercial apps, but the App Studio itself will be available for free to QuarkXPress 9 users within 90 days of the QuarkXPress 9 ship date.
The Blio eReader is a free, multi-platform, multi-device application that presents eBooks just like the printed versions, in full colour and with all of the features of the ideal eReader. The Blio eReader can be downloaded free from www.blio.com and is also pre-installed on millions of Windows computers from Toshiba, HP, and Dell, as well as devices that run the iOS, Android, and Silverlight platforms.
QuarkXPress 9 is currently the only page layout software with direct support for the Blio eReader, including the ability to enhance eBooks with interactive elements and a Read Logic feature that separates the print experience from the digital experience.
QuarkXPress 9 also includes an easy option for exporting to ePUB, the free and open e-book standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Designers can create traditional text-based e-books and publish to e-bookstores such as Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, NOOK, and Amazon Kindle. Book publishers can also export existing QuarkXPress layouts in ePUB format. QuarkXPress 9 includes a new Reflow View that allows designers to configure the content behind their layout to prepare it for reflow-based outputs such as ePUB. Designers can also automatically create an ePUB table of contents from the Reflow View’s article structure.
In addition to its innovative digital publishing capabilities, QuarkXPress 9 includes new features that help to automate the design process. The features are instrumental in increasing productivity and alleviating many manual, time-consuming design tasks.
• Conditional Styles: This new feature allows designers to automatically style content based on powerful styling rules
• Bullets and Numbering: Compatible with Microsoft Word import and export, the new Bullets and Numbering feature of QuarkXPress 9 makes it even easier to format ordered and unordered lists and complex multi-level outlines
• Callouts: 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: A wizard for 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: 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, which is most helpful when text within a layout is difficult to read and when reviewing stories that span multiple pages
• Cloner: The smartest and most efficient way to clone design elements, Cloner allows designers to copy items or pages to multiple other pages or layouts and can be used to combine layouts or split them apart
QuarkXPress 9 will ship in April 2011 and the price will match the current price of QuarkXPress 8: £779/ €1349 for a full product license and £279/ € 399 for upgrades from QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7.
It will be available through authorised Quark resellers (http://bit.ly/Quarkresellers) and through the Quark Store (http://shop.quark.com/ew ).
Visit Quark for a complete overview of QuarkXPress 9
