QuarkXPress used to have the world of high-end publishing to itself. But two misconceived releases contrived to drive many to jump ship to the more focused and powerful Adobe InDesign. With the most significant upgrade in years, Quark is finally acting to stop the rot.

QuarkXPress has prided itself on productivity, and with version 7 you can now group and dock palettes, and save and restore palette setups. You can also split your window view and open multiple windows onto a single layout or onto multiple layouts from the same project. The context-sensitive Measurements panel offers additional tabs for quick access to the features of the Modify and Attributes dialog box, but in a non-modal way so that changes update instantly.

The design capabilities in version 7 have also been reinvigorated. The improved OpenType and Unicode support, as well as the new Glyphs palette, make it simple to take advantage of advanced character sets, and you can also now see and select invisible characters such as em spaces. Table handling has been radically enhanced too, with a new Table menu providing access to new power including the ability to split tables and set up running headers and footer rows.

It’s the graphical side of design that sees the biggest improvements. You can now import native Photoshop PSD files complete with control over layer visibility and blend mode, and you can even map channels to spot colours. The excellent QuarkVista extension introduced in the recent free 6.5 release has also been given the odd tweak, but it’s disappointing that its non-destructive picture effects – directly managing hue, saturation, brightness and so on – can’t be applied to PSD files. Compensation comes in the form of support for alpha channels in both PSDs and TIFFs. Previously bitmap-based transparency depended on crude vector clipping paths; now you can fully and seamlessly integrate imported photos into your layouts with varying transparency.

Support for bitmap alpha channels is only the beginning of the new transparency controls. You can now set an opacity level anywhere you can apply a colour, so you’re able to control the transparency of text and picture boxes, their frames and their contents, right down to the individual character level. And, since you can set opacity in background blends, you’re also able to create varying transparency effects. It’s all very simple, but opens up huge creative power. Taking advantage of that, there’s dedicated drop-shadow handling, complete with control over opacity, offset and skew among other advanced options.

Further significant changes have been made to QuarkXPress’s core prepress capabilities. PDF handling has been improved with the ability to save and re-use output styles to verify output against the PDF/X 1-a and PDF/X 3 prepress standards, and to output JDF (Job Definition Format). There’s also added support for PostScript Level 3 smooth shading and in-RIP trapping, plus a new, always-on profile-based colour management system providing both presets and more advanced controls. Colour management specifications can also now be included as part of a new Job Ticket format that extends JDF and is designed to avoid prepress problems by specifying how items such as fonts, colours or images should be handled.

This brings QuarkXPress back into contention with InDesign in terms of design power; it even claims the lead for workflow productivity. Using the Shared Content palette, you can now synchronise not just text but its attributes – and do the same for pictures and their attendant effects. Once you’ve finalised a layout, you can now export it separately or use the new Append command to bring separate layouts together.

Far more powerful is the ability to share and synchronise layouts and sections of layouts. Designate existing elements as a ‘composition zone’ and then add this to the Shared Content palette so you can share logo and address between layouts in a stationery project. Edit the master, and all instances automatically update. Make a shared composition zone layout available to external projects so the same advert can be re-used in multiple projects. Crucially, the link remains live, so if the original advert is updated all instances are too.

This ability to share composition zones within and between projects is useful for all designers, but its full benefit is felt in workgroups. Multiple users can work on different sections of a publication at the same time, while the publication as a whole is updated. For QuarkXPress’s core target market of high-end users working collectively on complex publications to deadline, that’s gold. Throw in a major reduction in the standalone price and a good-value upgrade, and it’s clear Quark has heard the criticisms and acted. QuarkXPress certainly isn’t going down without a fight. It won’t cause a return mass migration, but it is an essential upgrade.