QuarkXpress 9 and QPS 9 officially launched in India

Simplicity: the main objective

At a formal get-together recently organized in New Delhi and Chennai, Quark officially launched its QuarkXPress 9 along with QPS 9 in the Indian market amongst the audience from newspapers and magazines publishing houses. The newest version of QuarkXPress allows designers to publish directly to digital devices and increase their productivity with new features for design automation. As the graphic design and page-layout software that puts designers at the center of the creative process, QuarkXPress helps creative and corporate professionals create design-rich layouts that can be published to print, web, and interactive Flash (SWF) media. QuarkXPress 9 will now give designers the power to design for and publish to digital devices in a variety of formats, while also offering them even more control over the execution of their creative visions.

QuarkXPress 9 includes new features that help automate the design process. The features are instrumental in increasing productivity and alleviating many manual, time-consuming design tasks. The new Conditional Styles feature allows designers to automatically style content based on powerful styling rules. It can format text anywhere in a story, including at the end of a paragraph, section, or story. Compatible with Microsoft Word import and export, the new ‘Bullets and Numbering’ feature of QuarkXPress 9 makes it even easier to format ordered and unordered lists and complex multi-level outlines. With the Callouts feature, boxes and groups move automatically with text as determined by the designer; callouts can be positioned relative to the page, spread, text box, paragraph, or character. A wizard for easily creating or modifying hard-to-draw shapes such as waves, polygons, stars, and spirals, ShapeMaker allows designers to create unique corner effects. ImageGrid enables designers to import and automatically build grids of images with a variety of layout options; also supporting image captioning. With Linkster feature, one can unlink and relink text boxes that already contain text, and also unlink stories spanning multiple pages. Story Editor provides a word-processor-like view within QuarkXPress, which is most helpful when text within a layout is difficult to read and when reviewing stories that span multiple pages. Dedicated text editing window allows the designer to work with text independent of the layout. The smartest and most efficient way to clone design elements, Cloner allows designers to copy items or pages to other pages or layouts.

For digital publishing, QuarkXPress 9 sets a precedent by offering designers a flexible and cost-effective array of options for creating content that can be published to digital devices – e-readers, smartphones, and tablets – with one tool, and without programming code. Whether a designer needs to publish directly from QuarkXPress to the iPad, create content for an e-book, or reach an expansive audience through the Blio eReader, QuarkXPress 9 can help. With App Studio for QuarkXPress, designers will have a dedicated design environment within QuarkXPress 9 for creating content for the iPad. It will allow users to create customised apps for the iPad, distribute their apps through the Apple App Store, and then publish richly designed, interactive content to the app.

Akal Singh Sujlana, marketing manager for Asia at Quark. Speaking on the occasion, Matthew Wallis senior vice president sales and marketing, EMEA & Asia, Quark pointed out that there are three million plus users worldwide of Quark solutions, including newspapers, magazines, ad agencies, news media, output providers, graphic designers, government departments, pharma companies, etc, and around five billion pages are produced using these solutions.

Explaining features of the new version of QuarkXPress and also presenting live demos, Akal Singh Sujlana, marketing manager for Asia at Quark mentioned that this solution will be offered with economical pricing options. The existing Quark users can get their solution upgraded just with an investment of Rs 17,000, while for new entrants, it is available for Rs 37,000, but those who are registered users of Adobe CorelDRAW can procure it for Rs 24,000.

Gopal Krishnan, director, Clavis Technologies Pvt Ltd also talked about the innovative features of the new version of QuarkXPress. He mentioned that with the new solution, processing will be done for different modules by auto modes – one button push, based on pre-defined templates. Instead of going for outsourcing for e-paper, etc, one can handle all these in house.

Rajeev Kumar, sales director, Absolut Info Systems Pvt Ltd (Quark premier reseller in India), who have 300+ customers, underlined language support features of the solutions. While Santosh Kumar Yadav, pre sales manager, Quark informed that with the new version of QuarkXPress internal communication amongst writers, reporters, editors, designers, etc is possible. Copy fitting is also feasible at final stage, apart from in-between reviewing.