Quark Primes For Web Publishing

Quark aims to set a foundation for interactive publishing next week at Seybold San Francisco, where it will showcase Quark XPress 5.0, an upgrade of its venerable page design and layout software.

The Denver-based ISV plans to give out copies of the XPress 5.0 beta, released Sept. 7, at the Sept. 24-28 professional media expo, company spokesman Glen Turpin said. Because the product remains in beta, Quark hasn't set pricing or a ship date and, in turn, hasn't set a release date for XPress 5.X, the OS X-native version for Macintosh users, he said.

With Internet publishing and other digital media on the rise, solution providers and end users have grown antsy waiting for the next version of XPress, especially the 5.X version for the Mac, the dominant Quark platform. Desktop publishing rival Adobe Systems also has turned up the heat on Quark by ramping up the user base for InDesign, its pro layout and design software. The San Jose, Calif.-based ISV is slated to unveil an update, InDesign 2.0, and an imaging server, AlterCast, at Seybold.

However, Jurgen Kurz, vice president of product management at Quark, said XPress 5.0 will be worth the wait. In his Sept. 24 keynote at Seybold, he said he plans to explain how XPress 5.0--paired with the Quark Digital Media System (DMS) and XTensions customization tools--forms the crux of a total publishing solution for print, the Web and electronic media.

"What we're trying to portray at Seybold is how XPress becomes the centerpiece of a media-independent publishing workflow that allows you to take content and put it into any media format and then distribute it, collaborate on it and manage it," Kurz said.

XPress 5.0 includes a new Tables feature that lets users create tables with text, graphics and images, plus a new Layers feature for isolating design items on separate "tiers" within documents, allowing users to better manage multiple document versions. And perhaps most eye-catching to end users, the upgrade includes interactive tools for transforming print layouts directly into Web pages. As a result, desktop publishers will be able use the familiar XPress tools for their online designs instead of having to learn other software for creating Web pages.

"Quark has always been a standard for print publishing, and now we're trying to extend that to all kinds of publishing," Kurz said. "With advertising going down significantly, the publishing industry is struggling right now. It's trying to be more productive by using the same content and staff for print and the Web, where it's not making any money yet. So I think that productivity will encourage a lot of customers to upgrade [to XPress 5.0]."

XPress 5.0 also features an improved user interface and color management, contextual menus and expanded support of standards for importing and exporting various file formats, such as HTML, PDF and XML. For XPress 5.X, Quark plans to include scalable vector graphics (SVG) capability, which would allow users to output a high-resolution, XPress-designed layout in a scalable, searchable format for the Web, Turpin said.

At Seybold, Quark also is slated to preview enhancements to Quark Active Publishing Server (QuarkAPS), introduced at Seybold Boston this spring, Turpin said. The server technology, which leverages XPress 5.0's typographic and rendering engines, is designed to enable "distributed" publishing environments, he said. For example, a newspaper using QuarkAPS could have an artist design a page box for an article, and then a reporter in the field could submit the copy to a server via a Web browser, place the story in the box and make it fit the space--creating a fully formatted document on the fly.

Solution providers will play a key role in driving Quark's "media-independent" publishing concept, Kurz said. At Seybold, Quark plans to have a Quark Solutions Pavilion for systems integrators and XTensions developers, who will help the company fit its open-API technology into solutions that meet the needs of customers' varying publishing workflows, he said.

"We have over 1,000 partners in our XTension developer program that create plug-ins to make our product more compelling," Kurz said. "Additionally, for our client/server channel, we have a system integrator program that allows them to take our applications and plug them into workflow solutions, allowing them to talk to business applications like SAP."

Quark plans to release QuarkAPS, which will run on Windows NT/2000 and Mac OS X Server, later this year. In several weeks, it also is slated to release version 1.6 of Quark DMS, its digital content storage, management and delivery system, Turpin said.