QuarkXPress 6 was launched at a series of rolling roadshows in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand by Angela Marsden, Modulo Systems general manager and her team.

Quark revolutionised digital design in 1987 with the launch of the first of its QuarkXPress programs and has since grown to be one of the industry’s premier design software tools, and only now is receiving credible challenge from the likes of Adobe InDesign.

However, Marsden believes that QuarkXPress 6 has answered the challenge well and says that it has the wood on Adobe’s product in a number of key areas.

The QuarkXPress 6 interface maximises the ease of use for designers, laid out in a series of palettes that allows easy access to a choice of tools, styles, colours and measurements, facilitating importation and manipulation of text and graphics to precise standards. ICC-based colour management is also supported, as is Apple ColorSync and Kodak Digital Science technology. The interface is adaptable to the user’s needs.

The range of typographic controls in the new version is extensive. Text can be formatted, scaled, custom hyphenated and justified, and moved in .001 increments for precise placement.

Accompanying the QuarkXPress 6 product are the QuarkXTensions and Xtensions modules, which allow users to customise and enhance the functionality of QuarkXPress 6 to suit any publishing environment. Also available is QuarkXPress Passport 6, which facilitates the display of menus and the checking of spelling in 11 different languages.

However, to cater for the various enhancements that have been made, QuarkXPress 6 requires a Mac OS X v.10.2 Jaguar or Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP platform to run.

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