QuarkXPress 9, UK & Ireland Edition (PC/Mac)

QuarkXPress 9 is a stable, incremental upgrade to what was once the world's leading DTP software, but lost ground to InDesign under Adobe's previous pricing policy. Now that InDesign is pitched at a similar price point, the overall advantages of QuarkXPress in terms of speed and stability make this a much more compelling choice. Key new features in version 9 are ePub output, conditional rules, callouts and bullets/numbering, as well as connection to Quark's (subscription based) iPad App publishing.

Like most other users, I experimented with InDesign when Adobe were essentially bundling it for free with CS Studio. InDesign is more intuitive for designers and photographers, because it is closely styled around the Photoshop/Illustrator experience. At that time, it also offered numerous refinements such as full Open Type support which were not yet available in Quark. However, Quark continued to be preferred for publishing, because InDesign was never able to match its stability and speed of use. Over versions 7-8, Quark worked hard on Job Jackets and other enterprise level functions to solidify their grasp on this part of the market.

With Version 9, Quark has gone after the cutting edge end of publishing and design, which is in ePublications and Apps, as well as introducing some new small-production level features such as text call-outs which follow the text, automatic bullets and numbering, cloning, the ability to make automatic image grids, conditional rules and bespoke shape construction, as well as a plain text editor which you may or may not want to use.

Strengths
Quark's greatest strength has always been its speed. For most parts of the workflow, it is essentially instantaneous on machines built in the last three or four years. Though a very fast, well specified machine will give InDesign some zip, it always feels sluggish by comparison with QuarkXPress.

This release is highly stable, though, like anything, poor network connections or other hardware issues render it vulnerable when saving. Quark's built in version backups strongly mitigate the effects of this, however.

The ePub features are worth the price of the upgrade alone, and will be a major selling feature for many buyers. Equally important is the steadily evolving Quark PDF output, which makes sense of tables of content, lists and indexes in a very transparent way.

Weaknesses
Quark is weak in HTML publishing and in Flash creation. It is really no weaker than any other non-dedicated system for this, and certainly no less disappointing than InDesign or Illustrator, but anyone hoping that Quark can replace bespoke software for these tasks is liable to be disappointed. What is especially disappointing is that Quark will not create HTML 5 in the place of Flash.

Essentially the purpose of Quark including these tools is so that you can integrate traditional print-based publishing with web and interactive. However, if you are designing documents in QuarkXpress, rather than a budget DTP application, your web-publishing is likely to be rather more advanced than the simple creation of flat HTML files for upload. In my experience, Quark is a good tool for briefing a web designer and for prepping an overall project, but is nowhere near up to the task of preparing theme files for a Content Management System. To be fair, InDesign is no better for this. As far as web development is concerned, it is still Dreamweaver to which professionals turn.

Overall
I had not expected to buy the upgrade for QuarkXPress 9 when my 30 day trial came to an end. However, the ability to deliver content (though not design, which is not part of the format) into ePub was sufficiently compelling on its own to justify the price of the upgrade. ePub is now so ubiquitous and popular that designers who are limited to only print, HTML or PDF will -- in my opinion -- find themselves progressively left behind.

Even though its price is now quite similar to InDesign, Quark still is not in any sense 'economy' or 'cheap' software. For those looking for a budget entry into Desk Top Publishing, Serif Page Plus is a much more economical alternative. Though it lacks many of Quark's most advanced features, such as job jacketing, pre-flighting and rule evaluation, these are unlikely to be missed by non-commercial users.

For those who need it, strongly recommended.

I recently, bought a quarkxpress 9 from amazon.co.uk. During installation, I was asked to input the Customer number. Since I was not given one, I tried with my order number but all to no avail.