Buy QuarkXPress Passport 7 (PC/Mac)QuarkXPress Passport 7 (PC/Mac) Product Description:
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
At last -- Quark gets the makeover it deserves
By Martin Turner
From version 3 to version 6, QuarkXpress moved from being a lean, fast and universally respected killer application to being a sluggish and under-featured legacy which surprised people more by its survival than by its capabilities. What's worse, Quark's draconian upgrade policies made it expensive to keep up to date. In the mean time, while Adobe innovated InDesign at a bargain price, Quark experimented with incomplete web solutions which never really captured a share of the market.Quark 7 is a welcome return to form, just at a time that Adobe has dramatically increased the upgrade price for its Colour Studio suite of applications.What makes this such a good upgrade is not a slew of new, powerful features (in other words, a slew of features you didn't previously need, but which slow down the application), but a noticeable speed hike and a set of small improvements that make most aspects of the program just a little bit better. For example, you can now add your own page formats to the list of options when creating a new project, and you can now take advantage of all of the features of Open Type. PDF output has been improved, and true drop shadows are now available without buying expensive (and cumbersome) extensions. A number of long-standing Quark quirks have been fixed, so that you can now get the indent and other special characters through the menus, rather than having to remember what the short-cut was. You can also browse Unicode glyphs, rather than trying to remember which key makes the arrow in Zapf Dingbats, and, for the first time, you can view the page in two different windows at once. There _are_ a couple of 'major new features', principally composition zones and job jackets, both aimed at collaborative publishing. Fortunately, these are not obligatory, and can be quickly forgotten about, unless they happen to satisfy a need you actually had and are worth the bother of retraining your staff and recreating your processes.I actually had no intention of purchasing this upgrade, having resigned myself to pursuing the InDesign route once Quark 6 reached the end of its useful life. Only the acquisition of another workstation, coupled with the sharp hike in Adobe prices, persuaded me to get it (I would have settled for Quark 6 on the new machine, but it was no longer available). I was very pleasantly surprised. I had found the upgrade from 4 to 6.5 quite painful, and had only followed it as we had moved to OS X, and Quark 4 was not supported. By comparison, this was an easy step, offering more of the kind of features we actually use, and less in the way of changes to our working practices. More to the point, the upgrade price, which was good from versions 4 through 6, was very reasonable, and included Quark Passport, while we were able to acquire a full license for the new workstation for less than the price of the Adobe suite.For the first time in a long time, I can happily recommend Quark users to upgrade.
Latest Price: Click Here - Amazon.co.uk!
More Info: Click Here - Amazon.co.uk!
See Customers Review: Click Here - Amazon.co.uk!
