Quark XPress

Description

Quark XPress is widely-used electronic publishing software. It provides the tools required to create, design, and deliver high-impact publications in both print and electronic media. It offers a suite of publishing features for:

• Layout and design
• Printing and output
• Text processing
• Colour management
• Web page design

Strengths

• Stable
• Logical in its presentation
• Good for long documents such as books
• Building an index is easier in the latest version
• You can lock your chapters or books to become read only
• Quark lets you open documents as different books and work with them as separate files
• Good at managing colours for output
• Sophisticated typography controls, precise layout functions, and built-in drawing tools
• Offers support for layers, tables, Web documents, and XML data
• It has had very few upgrades in its life
• Exported Web documents conform to open standards and can be opened and edited in standard web tools
• If you want to move a print document to a web document, it is only a matter of some cut and paste and a few slight adjustments.

Weaknesses

• A serious drawback is that QuarkXPress treats Web and print documents as mutually exclusive workflows
• Its XML functions are difficult to learn
• Beginning to show its age. E.g. the single Undo level is archaic
• Its type composition engine still gives you exact control over tracking and kerning, but it's not as sophisticated as others
• It cannot directly generate PDF files or import native Photoshop files
• The scattered XML functions are data extraction tools and not WYSIWYG
• It cannot access the specialised glyphs (such as ligatures or true fractions) offered by OpenType fonts
• Its interface is reported to be not as user-friendly as other tools.