VERDICT With its enhanced interface, support for transparency and new collaboration features, QuarkXPress 7.0 is the best release in years.

At one time QuarkXPress had the world of high-end publishing virtually to itself. However, those days are long gone.

With a couple of widely spaced, underpowered and misconceived releases allied with an eye-watering price, Quark contrived to alienate its users and drive a good proportion of them to jump ship to the more focused and more powerful Adobe InDesign. With the most significant upgrade in years Quark is finally acting to stop the rot.
QuarkXPress has always prided itself on its efficiency and productivity and this largely depends on a streamlined working environment. With version 7, Quark has made it possible to group and dock palettes and to save and restore palette set-ups. You can also now split your window view and open multiple windows onto a single layout or onto multiple layouts from the same project. The biggest practical improvement is the reworking of the context-sensitive Measurements panel which now offers additional tabs – Text, Frame, Runaround, Clipping and so on - that provide the functionality of QuarkXPress’s Modify and Attributes dialog box tabs but immediately to hand and in a non-modal way meaning that changes update instantly. The Measurements panel now acts as a central control panel for all work boosting efficiency enormously.
Where QuarkXPress primarily lost out to InDesign was in the core realm of design capabilities and version 7 addresses each major failing in turn. Text handling is key here and 7’s improved OpenType and Unicode support and the new Glyphs palette make it simple to take advantage of advanced character sets, and you can also now see and select invisible characters such as em spaces. Table handling has also been radically enhanced with a new Table menu providing access to new power such as the ability to split tables and to set up running headers and footer rows.
It’s with the graphical side of design that QuarkXPress 7 makes its biggest improvements. You can now import native Photoshop PSD files complete with control over layer visibility and blend mode and you can even map channels to spot colours. The excellent QuarkVista extension introduced in the recent free 6.5 release has also been given the odd tweak but it’s disappointing that its non-destructive picture effects – directly managing hue, saturation, brightness and so on – can’t be applied to PSD files. Compensation comes in the form of support for alpha channels in both PSDs and TIFFs. Previously bitmap-based transparency depended on crude vector clipping paths, now you can fully and seamlessly integrate imported photos into your layouts with varying transparency.
Support for bitmap alpha channels is only the beginning of QuarkXPress 7’s new transparency control. You can now set an opacity level anywhere you can apply a colour. That means you can control the transparency of text and picture boxes, their frames and their contents right down to the individual character level and, because you can set opacity in background blends, you can also create varying transparency effects. It’s all very simple but it opens up huge creative power that every designer will benefit from. And QuarkXPress 7 takes full advantage of this new transparency control to offer dedicated drop shadow handling complete with control over opacity, offset and skew along with advanced options such as shadow synchronization and control over runaround.