The company also enhanced Color features by adding support for Apple’s ColorSync, high-fidelity Hexachrome color, and the ability to create multi-ink colors. Hopefully, Quark will add better content resizing control in a future version. Commercial, third-party QuarkXTensions give a great deal more control, especially over the resizing of item contents, but this new feature will be a big boon to many users. Resizing grouped items no longer requires the aid of a QuarkXTension. Also, when specifying a frame, you now can specify a color for the gap (the white or transparent portions between frame lines or dash segments) as well as for the solid part of the frame or rule style. Dashes & Stripes may not sound particularly exciting, but it’s wonderful for anyone who has ever wanted to have a real, non-bitmapped coupon frame or for those who have wished to create their own striped or dashed rules and frames. ![]() ![]() Quark has made many other, more subtle additions. With the Book feature, you can specify one document to be a Master Chapter and synchronize all other documents in your “book” to match its settings. ![]() This tool might be overlooked by those who don’t produce books, catalogs, magazines, or other multichapter documents, but if you regularly create documents that must all use the same style sheets, H&J settings, colors, lists, and dashes and stripes, you’ll want to check it out. Slightly less glamorous but still great is the program’s new tool for working with long documents: the Book feature. This feature gives versatility in placing text and even allows text paths to be part of linked text chains. QuarkXPress 4.0 not only creates paths, it reads paths saved in Photoshop files, and, if more than one was saved, it allows you to choose which path will clip the image.Ī third great addition to QuarkXPress’ arsenal is the ability to set text on a path. In earlier ersions, you were forced to switch to and from Adobe Photoshop when working with paths. These nonrectangular boxes can be anchored into a text flow - very nice because in previous versions, anchored boxes had to be rectangular.Īnother superhelpful QuarkXPress 4.0 feature is the ability to create new or to adjust existing clipping paths. Once converted, the type is no longer editable as text, but it can have separate fill and frame colors, and its Bezier segments and points can be altered (see “Merge Mania,” p52). By default, the text becomes a picture box, but you can change the box into a text box (another new feature) and actually type text within text. Version 4.0 also brings the Text to Box feature, allowing the conversion of selected text into shapes editable with the Bezier tool. These new drawing features can work in conjunction with QuarkXPress’ new Merge commands to quickly create complex shapes (see “Divide and Conquer,” p51). Via modifier keys, you can add and delete points, and pause to edit paths while still actively drawing them. Shapes can be drawn point by point or freehand. If you’ve used Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand, these additions will be old friends. In one of its biggest improvements, QuarkXPress 4.0 features Bezier drawing tools. But enough posturing, let’s get to the goods. ![]() Some are big and splashy, others small and easily overlooked and a few will require some work before they become truly useful. There are many reasons to rejoice - some 80 new reasons in all. Designers and publishers should take a moment to scream "hurrah!" Quark 4.0 is one great app. What is QuarkXPress 4/Passport 4 and updates?Īfter years (and years) Quark finally released version 4.0 of its industry-leading page layout program, QuarkXPress.
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