[MW Forums]

Quark has added some good features to XPress 7. But the new territories Quark is staking out will hardly excite the broad design community, and they're difficult to learn. more

[Jamus]

Bravo on the improved PDF abilities, but...
"like a poor marksman you keep missing the target." Quuuuaaaaarrrrkkkk!

[Grapho]

Three mice? Man this dose not seem like a InDesign killer at all. Sad to see that fast as hell is really not fast a all. I guess Adobe can now take their time and come to market with a true Quark re-killer version of InDesign.

[Mississauga]

Well, maybe Quark 8... /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

[gloopstick]

I'm surprised to see such an in-depth review so quickly. Thanks!
Can anybody tell me, though, does QuarkXpress still have that INSANELY STUPID limitation of 48 x 48 inches for a page size? What are the engineering hurdles involved in fixing this? Sheesh! I can make a bigger page than that in Print Shop Deluxe, for Chrissake.
This question is just academic for me now. I switched to InDesign long ago, and I hope Quark dies a painful, shameful death for their years of lousy service and stagnant, awkward software.

[tigersmilk]

I still don't understand why anyone sticks with Quark. How many years will people wait hoping it will catch up with ID. Never going to happen.
I hope/assume they finally improved the palettes so one can view a list of graphics in the file and work on the file at the same time. What a time consuming limitation that was. Quark you are so 20th century it is pathetic.
tiger

[gMax]

Wow. I used to be a big Quark fan, gave up on them when ID1.5 came out... but do real designers these days still use this dinosaur? It's like browsing with IE!

[brycesteiner]

I guess I don't know why the responses have been so negative. They really is a drastic improvement over what was available in 5,6,&6.5
Version 4 was really the last reliable version with good features. I think this is really a step in the right direction for Quark and I wish them well, even though I am an ID user.
I really like the idea of the job jacket, though if somebody cannot make a file right or know how to check seps and preflight in the first place, do you really think they'll take an extra step and do this too? Especially if it is remotely difficult, I think it will become just another unused feature.
The transparency effects are good, but without blending modes it's about useless too.
The composition zones sounds wonderful. I hope ID gets that in the next edition. Working on a newspaper would be great with that.
I think it should have received a higher score than what was given even with being half-baked. The reviewer sounded too biased towareds ID.

[moose_n_squirrel]

Maybe "fast as hell" means "hell is when you want to go fast, and of course, since you're in hell, you can't."

[TheTSArt]

Gloopstick,

In reply to:

---

Can anybody tell me, though, does QuarkXpress still have that INSANELY STUPID limitation of 48 x 48 inches for a page size?

---

I'm only running the demo version... If I try to enter 49", it comes up with a dialog box that says "Value must be between 0.112 and 48"."

[Bryan]

I'm happy to see some of the new features, and not really impressed with others. I'm just glad that Quark is continuing to give me an alternative to InDesign, because that is a program that I really hate working in. I appreciare some of what ID can do, but for the most part it still feels like PageMaker to me. I'll probably continue to stick with Quark for as long as they continue to make it.

[NickDring]

Wow, its even slower than 6.5... In our print bureau we upgraded from 5 to 6 just so we could output from it. 18months on we have very few quark 6.5 clients. Some still use quark 4! But I'm in Italy and like most things here they are behind everyone else. I'd say clients are still a 50/50 mix of 9/X. They also seems to like corel draw on the pc. But I digress. Unless we have no other choice I won't be upgrading in a hurry. All in house origination is done using CS2. As you all know the PSD, AI, INDD combination is a great workflow. Quark missed the boat years ago. Even if they are nicer on the phone in the end if this v7 just cathes up with IND in most thing and is slower its not going to make people buy it. It HAD to do the opposite to get back to where it was years ago.

[harristype]

The comment "Fast as hell" was refering to the Universal Binary version running on the Mac/Intel platform. That combo is as "Fast as hell". Adobe InDesign Universal Binary? Maybe in 2007. Quark will have a free update to the UB version in June. I'm really looking forward to having to run Adobe CS2 in Rosetta. I was very impressed with the speed of the Quark 7 betas, and since I don't normally reflow 27-page documents, the speed I got was very close to 6.5, and faster in some areas. Since it seems that these negative comments are all coming from InDesign users who seem to live in the Quark forums (I use both, but I don't like having to plod through InDesign's interface, just my personal preference), I'm sticking with Quark. Of course, a lot of negative "you idiot" comments are sure to follow this post.

[GMGruman]

I wouldn't make any assumptions about the Universal Binary's promised speed. XPress 7 is slow running natively on PowerPC, which doesn't make sense if the goal was to improve the speed of the underlying application. I would have thought that maybe Quark designed the app for Intel and ported it to PowerPC, not worrying about speed, but since the Intel-native version is still in beta, that doesn't sem to be the case. Anyhow, promises are easy to make, and all vendors like to promote their products. Remember that Quark has a recent history of making promises it can't keep and then shipping several updates and plug-ins later to fill in the gaps -- version 6 was perhaps the most obnoxious example of this. Let's wait until the Intel-native version ships before accepting this latest claim.
By the way, you can see the specific speed test results at http://www.quarkxpre...7SpeedTests.pdf, not just the one set cited in the published review.