Though Mac OS X continues to evolve, many art departments have been sticking to OS 9, and it probably wasn't because they were nonplussed at the powers offered by the new OS. In all likelihood it was because QuarkXPress hadn't yet made the transition.
QuarkXPress has long been the de facto tool for designers and service bureaus, offering extremely precise control over the arrangement of objects on the screen and the eventual placement of dots on the printed page. Even after Adobe released InDesign, a similar professional page-layout application that ran on Mac OS X, many designers chose to wait rather than invest in a new program and migrate to a new file format.
Now there's no reason to wait: QuarkXPress 6, the latest version, runs on Mac OS X. But how, you might ask, does QuarkXPress compare with InDesign? This is a big question, and I'm not going to try to answer it here. But what I will do is take you on a spin with QuarkXPress 6, and this will give you one part of the puzzle as you make your decision. I have to say, right off the bat, that I'm not a professional designer or printer; but I've used QuarkXPress for years to create posters, invitations, and other amateur projects. So I created a dummy newsletter, and I'll use it to take you on a personal tour of the program.
But first let's examine the new features. One of the most obvious changes in QuarkXPress is that there are no more "Documents". Instead the program refers to files as "Projects". (But QuarkXPress 6 can still open up any QuarkXPress "Document", from previous versions of the program).
QuarkXPress 5 allows you to mix pages of various sizes, but the Project files in version 6 are even more flexible; they contain multiple "layout spaces", which can be either of the print or web variety, and you can switch between them just by making a change in a Layout Properties panel.
The new version has a few other web enhancements as well. It lets you create "cascading menus"--menus which allow users to roll over a menu item and have it branch into additional menu options. It lets you add specific fonts to cascading style sheets and to control how the viewers see your page if they don't have the optimal font. And it lets you create "two-position" rollovers so that one part of your page changes when users roll their mouse over another part. In addition, the new version has beefed up the program's PDF exporting abilities.
One of my favorite new features is the ability to view images in their full resolution. For years, images placed in QuarkXPress appeared in low resolution, as a way to save resources, keep file sizes low, and allow files to scroll fairly easily. But now QuarkXPress comes with an XTension (an add-on format designed by Quark but open to third-party developers) that allows you to view images in full resolution, without any loss in performance. For a complete list of all of the program's new features and enhancements, see the Quark Web site.
Here's that dummy newsletter that I told you about, which I created in QuarkXPress 6.
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As you can see, it looks pretty much like the same old QuarkXPress, and I found that all of the tried-and-true features work in the same dependable way. Click on any object, and you can position it using precise increments using the Measurements palette (shown at the bottom of the screen), or you can use the arrow keys (on their own, they move objects .014 inches; with the Option key, .001 inches). You can click between any letter pairs and specify the kerning using equally precise increments with the Measurements palette, as I did to the title in "The Dispatch". Below, you can see that I've zoomed in on the picture, and that it appears in full resolution.
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In this example, which is a very simple document, the full resolution just allows me to get a better sense of the colors in the picture. For more complex documents, such as advertisements, high-resolution previews allow for much more precise designs, when text is placed on top of an image.
First we'll see what happens when we take this file into PDF, then we'll move it onto the Web by converting it into HTML.
Although you can print any file to PDF using the Print Dialog Box of OS X, QuarkXPress has its own PDF Export feature, which offers a greater variety of options. But QuarkXPress 6 has a few quirky differences as compared to OS X's Print Dialog Box, so let's take a look at that first. When you issue the Print command in QuarkXPress, you don't get the standard OS X Print Dialog Box. Instead, you get QuarkXPress's own Print Dialog Box, which looks like this:
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As you can see, there is no Save AS PDF feature listed here, since the program has its own PDF Export feature. Also, there's no way to choose your printer here. Instead, you click the Printers button, and that will bring you to the OS X Print Dialog box, after you get the following message:
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That's a little confusing and awkward. If you choose a different printer and hit Print in the Print Dialog Box, it will merely close and return you to the QuarkXPress Print Dialog box, from which you must hit Print again. The same goes with PDFs; first you hit Save As PDF, you choose a file name and a place for it to go, you hit Save; then from the QuarkXPress dialog, you hit Print, and it saves the file. Using this method, I created a slick-looking PDF of the file, but it weighed in at 1.2MB.
When you export a file to PDF, you get a variety of additional options. Choose Export -> Layout as PDF from the file menu, and you'll get a panel from which you can save the file. Hit the Options button, and you'll get five panels of options:
In my first pass at exporting a PDF, the file was slightly less than a megabyte, but the image had no color, and the sidebar on the left came out solid black. I found this odd, since the defaults are Composite color and CMYK. I changed it to As Is, and everything looked fine, except that the file size had expanded to 2.3MB.
Next, I tried selecting Low Resolution under OPI; under Job Options, I turned compression on for color images, text, and line art. I was making some progress: The file was now 192k. However, although the colors and text came through OK, the two images were unrecognizable. I did some more experimenting: I unchecked Low Resolution and kept everything else the same; the resulting file looked fine, but weighed 1.3MB, just a tad larger than the file I created using OS X's Save As PDF command.
Selecting Low Resolution but turning off the compression under Job Options, the file went down to 196k but still looked pixellated. Finally, I resorted to brute force: I created a new version of the Quark Project file that contained smaller, lower-resolution graphics files that would look fine on screen. I exported the file again leaving Low Resolution unchecked and used no compression for graphics, but kept compression on for text. The PDF looked fine, and weighed just 420k, a respectable size.
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Now I'll walk you through my experiences exporting the file to HTML.
First I wanted to see what would happen if I simply changed a print layout to a Web layout and opened it in a browser. Converting QuarkXPress files to HTML has been a constant preoccupation for many magazines and other kinds of publishers. Often, magazines like to post stories on the Web after they've first appeared in print; what they normally do is reformat the entire thing, copying out all the text, and pasting it into a web format.
Then they take all the images and create web-friendly versions. Another option is to create PDFs, but opening PDFs is still fairly slow on many machines, since it requires the help of an additional application.
So I opened my Project file, "Dispatch", and duplicated the one Layout in the file by choosing Duplicate from the Layout menu. Then I called the new layout "Dispatch Online", and changed the Layout Type from Print to Web. I left everything else alone.
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If you ever want to change any of these options, such as adding a background color or choosing a background image, choose Properties from the Layout menu. As you can see, objects are all in the correct places, and everything looks the same.
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If we zoom into the tiny text of the caption, we see that even that is rendered correctly. You'll notice that in the corner of every box is a camera icon; as you many have guessed, everything looks fine in the web layout because all of the elements have been turned into graphics.
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I then chose Export -> HTML from the file menu, and after telling the program where I'd like to store the folders, it created an HTML file and a folder full of web-optimized graphics. You can see that for the most part, this page looks fine, although it might look better or worse depending on your browser.
Compare it to the PDF I created earlier. If you look a little closer at the HTML page, you'll see that the caption didn't come through, even though it looked fine in the web layout. Also, you'll notice that the title looks jagged because the program didn't treat the type with any kind of anti-aliasing, a trick whereby pixels of progressively lighter shade are placed around the edges of a graphic to make it look smooth.
I searched high and low, by the way, and there didn't seem to be an option for doing this. (Are you listening, XTension developers?) However, we're not doing too badly in the file-size department; the HTML file and all its assets weigh only 360k.
I thought I'd try to rescue the caption. It had been set in 6pt Verdana, and I changed it to 8pt. As you can see in the next export, I'm not out of the woods yet. The type is barely legible, and I had to enlarge the box that the caption is in, altering the layout.
I experimented next with taking select text boxes and telling QuarkXPress I'd rather they not be exported as graphics. You can do this by selecting a box, choosing Modify from the Item menu, and unchecking the box at the bottom that says "Convert to graphic on Export". Doing this cut my file size down to 108k, but it unleashed a series of problems that I won't assault your eyes with.
For one thing, it completely changed the leading, throwing the original design out the window. The point is that if you want to publish a QuarkXPress document online, export everything as graphics. For the sake of some tiny text, you might have to tweak the design a bit. If you really need to preserve the integrity of the original printed document, use PDF.
There is, however, one more important drawback to exporting QuarkXPress documents as HTML, which involves multi-page documents. When you save your file as PDF, this isn't a problem; if you have a ten-page document, the PDF will also be ten pages long. But that's not the case when you use QuarkXPress to export a multi-page document as HTML. Instead, QuarkXPress will create pages called "Export1.htm," "Export2.htm," etc.. When you open Export1.htm, you won't have any way to move to the next page or back again. So you have to build this navigation into your the pages explicitly. I checked with a representative from Quark, who said he didn't know of an XTension developer with a solution that would do this from within QuarkXPress. (Once again, developers, here's your chance!)
If you want to create an online version of a printed document (or vice versa), it would probably be best to use the method I described just as a starting point and then significantly tweak the online version until it can squarely stand on its own feet. You might want to import graphics to replace the headlines, and you'll want to add hyperlinks of course and other navigational elements.
QuarkXPress 6 also lets you select individual text boxes in any layout (print or Web) and "synchronize" them with corresponding boxes in any other layout in your project. Though the two layouts might look very different, any synchronized text in the one version will immediately reflect changes made to the corresponding text in the other version.
To do this, click on any text box and choose Synchronize Text from the Style menu. Give the Synchronized Text a name, and that name will appear in the Synchronized Text Window. Then go to any other text box in any other layout in the same project, click on the Synchronized Text name in the Synchronized Text window, and then click the "Insert Text Into Text Box" button at the top of the Synchronized Text window. From that point on, the text in both boxes in each layout will be the same.
Another way to take advantage of the multi-layout aspects of QuarkXPress would be to use the program to create HTML from scratch, since you can position the objects exactly where you want them. (Try using Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX to do that, even if you're working in its Design View, and you'll be unpleasantly amazed at the many ways you can't position objects.) Then you can bring the HTML file into Dreamweaver or whatever other HTML editor you'd like, for the heavy coding. From there you can swap out the jagged titles and replace them with your own anti-aliased ones, and perform all the other fancy HTML moves at your disposal.
QuarkXPress is not cheap, but if you already work with QuarkXPress files, version 6 would be a great reason to upgrade to Mac OS X, which crashes far less frequently and brutally than OS 9, among other things. From what I've seen, QuarkXPress 6 is just as simple and flexible as its predecessors.
The new version's web features are a bit rough, but they point a way toward a much more intuitive way to design web pages. It's certainly worth the couple of hundred or so it would cost to upgrade from 5, but if you're thinking of purchasing QuarkXPress or InDesign for a new design shop, recommending one over the other is way beyond the scope of what I've covered here. Read everything you can about both products. I hope I've given you a hands-on feel for what it's like to grapple with a few problems using QuarkXPress 6.
David Weiss is an Oakland, California based freelance writer. He's worked as a senior editor at Macworld magazine, and as the lead editor of MacHome Journal. Read more about David at www.davidweiss.net.
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