HOW QUARK REVOLUTIONIZED PUBLISHING
Quark was founded in 1981 in Denver, Colorado, by Tim Gill. After writing several successful programs for the Apple II and Apple III computers (including Word Juggler and Catalyst), Gill saw Apple’s Macintosh computer and realized that it could change the world of publishing. Until that time, publishing systems were available to only the wealthiest members of society, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars. But in the late 1980s, all publishing required was a Macintosh, QuarkXPress, and a LaserWriter – at a total cost of less than $10,000.
This tenfold reduction in the price of publishing indeed created a new worldwide industry that came to be known as Desktop Publishing. But most important, it put publishing into the hands of those formerly without a voice. This was the idea that most excited Gill, who in 1986 took on a financial partner named Fred Ebrahimi. Together, they conquered the publishing world in several ways: by building QuarkXPress into the tool that 90 percent of publishers wanted to use; by extending its reach into historically disenfranchised areas of the world such as India, Latin America, and portions of East Asia; and by supporting a cottage industry of trainers and XTension developers.
Being a programmer himself, Gill had a special place in his heart for independent programmers who wanted to make a difference in the world but wanted to work for themselves. He held training events for XTension developers, invited them to Quark’s events, and even helped set up a worldwide marketing distributor for XTensions so that the developers could spend their time coding instead of marketing. Quark benefitted, of course, by being able to focus on improving the core set of features in QuarkXPress needed by most users, and allowing the XTension developers to provide solutions for specific needs. When some of those XTensions later became features in QuarkXPress, Gill always tried to take care of the developers. (When Quark released a Windows version of QuarkXPress, Gill cleverly released free XTensions to give features to Mac users that weren’t possible to create in Windows.)
In 2000, Gill sold his half of Quark to Fred Ebrahimi to focus on philanthropic endeavors such as The Gill Foundation. Quark and QuarkXPress never fully recovered from Gill’s departure, but still maintain a strong presence in enterprise and vertical markets that value efficiency. (In 2006, Fred Ebrahimi gave all his shares of Quark Inc. to his children, with his daughter Sasha taking the position of Chairman. In 2006, Quark also hired Raymond Schiavone, former CEO of Arbortext, as its new CEO. In 2011, the Ebrahimi family sold all its shares to Platinum Equity, a California-based private equity firm that focuses on underperforming companies with high potential.)
Getting a Feel for What’s New in QuarkXPress 2016
The biggest new feature in QuarkXPress 2016 is the capability to convert imported PDF, EPS, and Adobe Illustrator files to native, editable QuarkXPress objects. You can even convert objects or entire pages from Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Office (including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), CorelDRAW, Affinity Designer, and other apps.
The program sports many other new features as well. You can export any QuarkXPress layout as an HTML5 publication, enabling you to create an app-like experience in a web browser or mobile device – complete with interactive objects and all the typographic control in QuarkXPress. You can create multicolor blends (gradients), each color with its own level of opacity. The new Fit Box to Text feature resizes a text box so that if your text is shorter than the box, or if it overflows the box, the box resizes to fit the text. This feature even balances text in boxes that have multiple columns of text. The new Color Picker (formerly only available as an XTension) lets you click any item (including imported pictures) to add new color swatches to your layout. You can access Stylistic Sets included in advanced OpenType fonts. You can enlarge the icons and labels on the Measurements palette by 50 percent.
QuarkXPress 2016 also offers improvements to existing features. In previous versions of QuarkXPress, for example, dynamic guides appear as you drag an item to show you its spacing in relationship to other items. This feature lets you easily align and uniformly space items. In QuarkXPress 2016, guides now appear that show when the edges and centers of text columns and gutters align with other items in multicolumn text boxes. The Find/Change feature now remembers your most recent searches; also, it allows you to search for and change nonbreaking spaces and characters. Content variables can now wrap onto multiple lines just as regular text does, which is useful for longer headers and for created/modified/printed slugs. Print experts will appreciate full support for ICCv4 color profiles. And the QuarkCacheCleaner app now deletes the QuarkXPress Preferences file as well as the font and picture cache files used by QuarkXPress.
Windows users will be happy to have the modern, efficient user interface that Mac users have enjoyed in previous releases. And if you use a Mac, you can now pinch, zoom, and rotate items using gestures on your Mac’s touchpad.
Installing QuarkXPress 2016 on a Mac is now blissfully easy: Just drag it into your Mac’s Applications folder. In contrast to previous versions, which required XTensions to be rewritten for each new version of QuarkXPress, XTensions written for QuarkXPress 2015 also work with QuarkXPress 2016 (as long as the XTension doesn’t conflict with a new function). And as opposed to Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress doesn’t require payment of an ongoing subscription – its perpetual license lets you use the program forever.
If you forget which features are new, choose Help ⇒ What’s New to be taken to Quark’s website to find an explanation of the new features.
Introducing the Big Features in Recent Versions
If you skipped a release or three, you’re not alone – but you’ve missed some efficiency-enhancing improvements. Conveniently, Quark has provided a chart of new features that stretches back to version 7 and has allowed me to include it in the appendix of this book. Here are some of the most exciting and useful new features introduced since version 7:
❯❯ Intelligent palettes that adapt to your work
❯❯ Layers on master pages
❯❯ The capability to drag and drop from other apps, the desktop, and Adobe Bridge
❯❯ Having a page size larger than 48 inches
❯❯ Having multiple page sizes in one document
❯❯ Crisp display of all images
❯❯ The capability to scale images up to 5000 percent
❯❯ An 8000 percent zoom
❯❯ The capability to import native Photoshop (PSD) and Illustrator (AI) files
❯❯ The capability to relink images in Usage dialog
❯❯ Format painter
❯❯ Item Find/Change
❯❯ Item Styles
❯❯ A page thumbnail navigator (Mac only)
❯❯ Cloner utility copies items or pages across layouts
❯❯ Intelligent scaling: You choose the attributes to scale
❯❯ Footnotes/Endnotes
❯❯ Table styles
❯❯ Sound, video, and interactivity
❯❯ The capability to synchronize text, pictures, and formatting automatically
❯❯ Conditional styles
❯❯ Callouts
❯❯ Hanging punctuation
❯❯ Bullets and numbering
❯❯ Story Editor
❯❯ Redlining
❯❯ Notes
❯❯ Glyphs palette
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