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Drawing tools similar to those in Adobe Illustrator. Designers will be able to draw frames--the containers for text or images--into any shape, based on what are called Bezier points and curve handles. There will be a "Merge Items" command that will enable a designer to create complex shapes by building upon simple shapes; conversely, there will be a "Split Items" command that can be used to generate multiple frames from a single complex frame.
As in Illustrator, 'Xpress 4.0 will have the ability to create and edit "clipping paths," the PostScript function that defines irregular crops of images (known as "Paste Inside" in Macromedia's FreeHand), and read the clipping paths from TIFF or EPS files.
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Other new graphics tools. These will include color controls that will enable users to mix spot colors to create new hues, as well as support for HiFi Color process printing, which allows more than four process colors.
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Pop-up tool bars. These also will be similar to those in Illustrator. If the user holds down the control key while clicking on a tool-bar item, a group of related functions will pop out to the right, giving more choices in the small screen space. This will be necessary because of all those drawing tools.
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Advanced typographical controls. 'Xpress 4.0 is alleged to support new text-runaround features that will allow wrapping text on both sides of an object (a longtime feature of Adobe PageMaker).
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Character-based style sheets. The application will allow the designer to define typography on something more refined than a whole paragraph. The people who spoke with MacWeek said the new version will support thousands of style sheets and allow search-and-replace of commands within those style sheets.
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Long-document handling. The new 'Xpress will allow those of us who are making books instead of newspapers to merge multiple 'Xpress files into one long document. Further, 'Xpress 4.0 is supposed to handle tables of contents and indices with ease.
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A new 'Xtensions Manager. This will assist in tracking the little bits of code that expand 'Xpress' capabilities.
Beware the New 'Xpress Lane
by David M. Cole
There was a time when there really wasn't a choice in desktop color-separation systems: We had to use QuarkXpress.
At that time, circa 1987, the other leading page-layout programs didn't offer integrated color-separation services. You had to send your PostScript file to another application, which then produced four discrete files-and it wasn't very fast.
So 'Xpress has helped the newspaper industry for almost a decade now, and in return, our industry has helped Denver-based Quark Inc. One of the company's first ad campaigns featured a coworker of mine happily putting out a newspaper using QuarkXpress. Which is why I was puzzled a few weeks ago when I read a MacWeek story detailing the features Quark plans to include in its next version of 'Xpress, which is slated to hit the market right around NEXPO'97.
Here are the features the weekly trade magazine said 'Xpress 4.0 would include:
Though I guess some of the drawing functions will benefit some newspapers, and the character-based style sheets are long overdue, the vast majority of the features that have been publicized just aren't too interesting to the newspaper industry.
One feature that I know will be in QuarkXpress 4.0 but wasn't mentioned in the MacWeek article will be the ability for integrators to "unplug" 'Xpress' dictionary and "plug in" one of their own. This will help companies that sell Quark Publishing System and probably companies like Atex Media Solutions that depend heavily on 'Xpress.
This feature was requested by the newspaper industry explicitly and will be welcome. It will allow users to tell the program how to hyphenate words (since some of the decisions 'Xpress makes are ludicrous) and to support newspaper-specific words (we all have 'em-unique spellings and hyphenations of street names, city names, public figures, etc.).
Further, developers will be able to use this plug-compatible dictionary to ease the discordant link between 'Xpress and word processors like Microsoft Word. With the proper licensing agreements, an integrator could put the same dictionary in both programs, thereby allowing the word processor to make better length estimates on stories.
But, if you take into account that it's been almost three years since the last upgrade to 'Xpress, the new version seems almost too little too late--especially for newspapers.
If I were handling systems for a newspaper, I would certainly take a long, hard look at whether it would be worth my while to upgrade to 'Xpress 4.0. Even though there may be some compatibility and support issues for those who don't upgrade, I suspect there will not be enough of a business case to justify the upgrade cost.
Now that it's circa 1997, you don't have to use QuarkXpress--and version 4.0 may just convince you of that.
Cole is a San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, dmc@colegroup.com; phone, (415) 673-2424; fax, (415) 673-2449. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.