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Monster Media 1993 #2
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QUARKX.TXT
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1993-05-29
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Quark XPress is Coming to Windows
by Daniel C. Jordan
I recently had the opportunity to attend an invite only seminar for
printing professionals, held at the Amherst Marriott Hotel by
Taussig's Graphic Supply. The feature speaker was Eric Grae, Retail
Sales Representative for Quark. Taussig's and 3M provided backup
information on high end output devices, paper, and films. All said
and done, it was a very informative seminar.
By the time you read this there will be another page layout program
running under Microsoft Windows, Quark is considered to be the best
page layout program on the Macintosh. Quark XPress for Windows will
be a powerful new tool for serious page layout professionals, but it
will not come cheap. Quark Systems knows that they have a solid
program that professionals want, and will pay for (at least on the
Macintosh side). So don't expect to get a great deal on a
competitive upgrade or a drastically reduced promotion price. Quark
claims that their product sells itself and they can plow all of
their profits back into R&D to make the product better. It kind of
sounds to me like Quark is used to a closed market on the Macintosh;
over there people will pay the asking price because its a MAC.
Quark Systems did give out two T-shirts and a sweat shirt at the
Taussig's seminar, but that's not much for a crowd of about 150
printing professionals. On the positive side, Eric did agree to send
me one of their educational Quark XPress programs for evaluation.
Quark even guards these quite closely. An educational version is the
old shareware story of a fully functional program that is disabled
in some way. Quark XPress will print Quark across the page upon
output and any document saved in the disabled version cannot be
opened in a legitimate version of Quark. However, this program is
the same in every other way, which makes it a good instructional
tool.
Quark XPress competes with Aldus PageMaker and FrameMaker (FrameMaker
is originally a UNIX application) on the Macintosh and does quite
well in the professional page layout field. Eric says that "On the
Mac, a IIci should be the minimum hardware platform to run Quark and
a Quadra 950 is recommended." I would like to point out that some
local institutions run Quark on a Mac Plus. This is slow but
functional. Roughly translated into Microsoft Windows 3.1 hardware
requirements, you can expect to see satisfactory results with a 386
and 8 megabytes of RAM, but a 486 would definitely be preferred. As
with the Macintosh, you will be able to run Quark on a lot less - but
only if you are a patient sort of person. For those of you who have
followed my articles through the desktop publishing maze you may be
starting to notice a recurring theme - "More Power" as Tim the Tool
Man so eloquently puts it. Large high resolution monitors, massive
storage requirements, and heavy traffic through RAM to the CPU are
pushing up the minimum productive requirements of the hardware we
use.
So what's the big deal with Quark XPress coming to Windows? Ventura
Publisher has been around for quite a while, Aldus PageMaker has also
been on the PC for some time ( it came from the Macintosh as well).
FrameMaker has recently showed up under Windows as well (noted for
its handling of book length documents) so what does Quark have to
offer to the high end page layout market on the PC?
Monitor gamma adjustment is the ability to color correct your
monitor to match printed material. This is very important in color
printing. Quark also sports real time graphics movement; this means
smooth glide of an object across your screen instead of multiple
jerky screen redraws. Quark XPress spends a lot of processing power
on text handling, drop caps, user defined text rotation angles and,
real time text modification. Quark also supports Pantone color
palettes and all major type manufactures. These are just a few of
the items in Quark's power user's tool kit.
Quark XPress does not profess to be everything to everybody but uses
a technique known as Extensions (third party add on programs that
merge into Quark to become one. With this method Quark XPress is
customized to the individual's business needs without carrying
unwanted baggage. Incidentally, a quark is the smallest known
particle of an atom, the building blocks of everything else. Quark
Systems sees their product that way - a small building block with
which every thing else is built.