Prepress
Quark Announces QuarkXPress 9
Wednesday 23. February 2011 - Digital Publishing, Design-driven Automation, and a Continued Focus on Advancing the Designers Experience Define Newest Version of QuarkXPress
Quark announced today QuarkXPress 9, the newest version of QuarkXPress, which will allow 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 already 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.
Invitation to Launch Event
Today Quark is hosting an online launch event to unveil QuarkXPress 9, review its new capabilities, and introduce early adopters and partners.
Digital Publishing with QuarkXPress 9
QuarkXPress 9 sets a precedent for digital publishing 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.
App Studio for QuarkXPress: With App Studio for QuarkXPress, designers will have a dedicated design environment within QuarkXPress 9 for creating content for the iPad. Designers will be able 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. QuarkXPress 9 provides familiar tools to easily repurpose existing content or to design content specifically for the iPad that includes video/audio players, slideshows, scrollable regions, Web overlays, pop-up windows, buttons, and hyperlinks.*
Design for the Blio eReader: The Blio eReader is a free, multi-platform, multi-device application that presents eBooks just like the printed versions, in full colour and with all of the features of the ideal eReader. The Blio eReader can be downloaded free from www.blio.com and is also pre-installed on millions of Windows computers from Toshiba, HP, and Dell, as well as devices that run the iOS, Android, and Silverlight platforms. QuarkXPress 9 is the only page layout software with direct support for the Blio eReader, including the ability to enhance eBooks with interactive elements and a Read Logic feature that separates the print experience from the digital experience.
Export to ePUB: QuarkXPress 9 includes an easy option for exporting to ePUB, the free and open e-book standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Designers can create traditional text-based e-books and publish to e-bookstores such as Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble NOOK, and Amazon Kindle. Book publishers can also export existing QuarkXPress layouts in ePUB format. QuarkXPress 9 includes a new Reflow View that allows designers to configure the content behind their layout to prepare it for reflow-based outputs such as ePUB. Designers can also automatically create an ePUB table of contents from the Reflow Views article structure.
Design-driven Automation
In addition to its innovative digital publishing capabilities, QuarkXPress 9 includes new features that help to automate the design process. The features are instrumental in increasing productivity and alleviating many manual, time-consuming design tasks.
Conditional Styles: This new feature allows designers to automatically style content based on powerful styling rules
Bullets and Numbering: 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
Callouts: 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
ShapeMaker: A wizard for easily creating or modifying hard-to-draw shapes such as waves, polygons, stars, and spirals, ShapeMaker also allows designers to create unique corner effects
ImageGrid: Allows designers to import and automatically build grids of images with a variety of layout options; also supports image captioning
Linkster: Enables designers to unlink and relink text boxes that already contain text, to unlink stories spanning multiple pages, and to link or unlink boxes without disrupting existing text
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
Cloner: The smartest and most efficient way to clone design elements, Cloner allows designers to copy items or pages to multiple other pages or layouts and can be used to combine layouts or split them apart
Availability and Pricing
QuarkXPress 9 will ship in April 2011 and the price will match the current price of QuarkXPress 8: 1349 Euro for a full product license and 399 Euro for upgrades from QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7. It will be available through authorised Quark resellers (http://bit.ly/Quarkresellers) and through the Quark Store. App Studio for QuarkXPress which enables publishing to the iPad will be available as a free update to QuarkXPress 9 users within 90 days after QuarkXPress 9 ships.
Buy QuarkXPress 8, Get QuarkXPress 9
From 23rd February 2011 to 30th April 2011, anyone who purchases or upgrades to QuarkXPress 8 at regular price is eligible to upgrade to QuarkXPress 9 for free. In addition, any customers who purchased QuarkXPress 8 between 1st January 2011 and 23rd February 2011 are entitled to a complimentary upgrade to QuarkXPress 9.