QuarkXPress defines and dominates high-end publishing in much the same way as Adobe Photoshop does photo editing. Take a look at any newsstand and the majority of publications on sale will have been designed using it, including PC Authority.

With such a demanding user base, Quark has to make sure it has everything absolutely right before releasing a new version, and its almost four years since the last major upgrade, version 4, was released. Thats an age in software terms, so expectations were high. More importantly, during this time Adobe has developed its own rival to XPress, InDesign (see review page 54). Competition has clearly focused Quarks mind, and just two days after Adobe announced that InDesign 2 was shipping, Quark did the same for the US version of XPress 5.

Its clear Quark wants to crush InDesign before the young pretender wins any converts. The question is: does XPress 5 do enough to secure its following and protect its crown?

Unrest has certainly been brewing among XPress users for some time and for one overriding reason: the Web. Almost by definition, XPress users are in the business of shifting regular amounts of high-value content and they naturally want to be able to deliver this content on screen as well as on paper. As Brett Mueller, senior product manager at Quark, puts it: Our customers have told us that its vital for them to manage costs by merging print and Web workflows.
In the past, Quark tried to provide its own proprietary Web solution to enable this in the form of its Immedia technology, but it proved impractical and died. Now Quark has eMBraced open standards and is determined to make XPress as natural a choice for Web publishing as it is for print.

Web la Quark
The difference is apparent as soon as you start work, as the File | New command now provides a separate Web Document option. Select this and youre presented with a dialog where you can set default colours for text, background and links, set up a repeating image background and specify a default page width. Once the page appears, you create your design by placing text and picture boxes anywhere on your layout and then loading graphics and formatting text. Certain commands such as kerning and baseline shift arent appropriate in Web mode, so they are greyed out, but generally you work as youve always done. In other words, anyone familiar with XPress can be designing Web pages within minutes.

Of course, there are differences when designing for the Web. To begin with, the Web is an interactive hypertext environment in which users expect to be able to jump from location to location. In XPress 5, this is managed with the new Hyperlinks palette. Simply select either a picture box with the Item tool or some text with the Content tool and then hit the palettes New Anchor icon to create a target destination, or the New Hyperlink icon to choose an internal anchor or an external URL. Once added, all targets in the document are automatically listed in the palette and you can add new links by clicking them.

For more advanced graphical links, XPress 5 supports both rollovers and image maps. To create a rollover, you simply select a picture box and then the Item | Rollover command to specify the rollover image and the target anchor or external URL. To add rectangular, oval or Bzier image map links, you use the tools on the new Web toolbar to mark up areas on the picture box and then the Hyperlinks palette to set up the links.

The Web toolbar also comes into use when creating forms to gather data from visitors to your site. In addition to the Form Box tool itself, XPress offers eight options for handling data with its Text Field, Button, Image Button, Pop-up Menu, List Box, File Selector, Check Box and Radio Button tools. In each case, calling up the Modify... command lets you edit settings for example, to populate dropdowns or to change your button between Submit and Reset modes.
Thats just about it in terms of Web design power, so the next step is to see how your pages perform. You cant see your pages in action from within XPress, so instead you have to hit the HTML Preview icon on the status bar, which loads a temporary version of your document into your browser. When youre happy with that, you export the final version with the rudimentary Export | HTML command. You must then load the HTML and images to your server, and thats all there is to it.

The whole process is certainly simple, but is it practical? Its worth taking a look at the end results more closely. In terms of design, XPress recreates the freeform page layout using HTML tables and spacer .gifs, which can easily lead to awkward and bloated code. In terms of text formatting, XPress relies on CSS (cascading style sheets) where it can, which is fine if all your users have supporting browsers and the desired fonts. More worryingly, where CSS cant cope, such as with non-rectangular textboxes, XPress just converts the text to download-heavy and unsearchable bitmaps. Plus, the control over Web images generally is negligible, with the ability to choose between just five quality settings when converting to JPEG and between four basic palettes when converting to GIF, and all with no preview.

The amount of Web power on offer is basic, but the level of control is worse. This is especially true of XPress coding capabilities or lack of them.

Each Web page is built on HTML/CSS code, but the only direct access XPress provides to edit the tags that define each page is the ability to set up page titles and meta tags for describing keywords, author information and so on. And even this is so hidden away and awkward that its almost unusable. The end result is that while XPress offers state-of-the-art print-based publishing, you can gain more advanced Web authoring capabilities with any freeware Web design package.

Of course, it would be a lot to ask XPress to take on the likes of Dreamweaver and GoLive directly, but after three years it could certainly have done more (whats happened to the promised SVG and SWF support, for example?). More importantly, competition is the opposite of what users are looking for. What they want is for the two applications to work together, so that work isnt duplicated needlessly. Unfortunately Quark has misunderstood completely, trying to merge the Web and print applications themselves rather than the workflows.

This mistake is fundamental and goes right back to square one when the user has to choose between creating a normal or a Web document. The whole point is that they want to create both without having to start again from scratch.

Unfortunately, as you cant convert between XPress print-oriented QXD and its new Web-oriented QWD documents, the only option is to start again. Plus, with so little power and control on offer, few of Quarks high-end users are going to choose to use XPress when they do want a Web document.

To be fair to Quark, there is no easy way to swap between layouts intended for design-intensive, page-based, PostScript-oriented print and reflowable, screen-based, HTML output. The fundamental problem lies in the inherent limitations of HTML as a design medium. Fortunately, the solution is on its way in the form of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and, here at least, Quark has been quick to spot the promise. For the last year or so, Quark has made its avenue .quark XTension available for those users wanting to explore the potential of XML publishing and now its bundled the capability into XPress 5.

XML inside
XMLs advantages over HTML are twofold: its both more flexible and more rigorous. The flexibility means that publishers arent limited to HTMLs built-in tags, but can create their own, finetuned to the content that theyre publishing. The rigour means that browsers know exactly how to interpret the code, which opens up the possibility of real design cont