QuarkXpress 5.0-Mac

Rating:
Summary: Not worth the money if you already own Quark 4
Review: Although QuarkXpress 5.0 delivers everything its previous version offers, frankly, it doesn't offer enough in addition to these things to merit a $900 upgrade. In fact, this new version has some very serious drawbacks--namely, it is not native to OS X, meaning it has to run in the sometimes choppy "Classic" system. This leads to major refresh problems that can be quite a hassle. In addition, some of the things that have always bothered me about Quark--the necessity of clipping paths, making images transparent, etc.--are still there. I'm actually in the process of switching over to Adobe InDesign, which fixes all these problems AND is native to OSX. Until Quark comes out with a patch or an upgrade that will make their program native to OSX, pass on buying this upgrade, which offers little for the extremely high price.

Rating:
Summary: Not worth the money if you already own Quark 4
Review: Although QuarkXpress 5.0 delivers everything its previous version offers, frankly, it doesn't offer enough in addition to these things to merit a $900 upgrade. In fact, this new version has some very serious drawbacks--namely, it is not native to OS X, meaning it has to run in the sometimes choppy "Classic" system. This leads to major refresh problems that can be quite a hassle. In addition, some of the things that have always bothered me about Quark--the necessity of clipping paths, making images transparent, etc.--are still there. I'm actually in the process of switching over to Adobe InDesign, which fixes all these problems AND is native to OSX. Until Quark comes out with a patch or an upgrade that will make their program native to OSX, pass on buying this upgrade, which offers little for the extremely high price.

Rating:
Summary: Still The Best
Review: I have both InDesign and Quark and I have to say that Quark is the most reliable and efficient of the two. InDesign is a PageMaker that aspires to be Quark. Especially great is the new Quark feature that collects the fonts as well as images. Before you could only collect the images! No more searching around for all those fonts. Quark crashes far less than all the other programs I use combined.

Rating:
Summary: Growing long in the tooth...
Review: Old technology being rapidly overtaking by InDesign 2.0, especially if you want to use OS X. If you are just starting in page layout, use InDesign. If you have been doing it for awhile and have a lot of documents in xpress format, byte the bullet now and convert them to InDesign. You are going to have to at some point anyway.

Rating:
Summary: Quark Excels for Page Layout
Review: This is the one you want. Not PageMaker. Not InDesign. And whatever you do, don't buy Publisher.

Buy Quark.

Sure, you'll lay down some serious bucks. But you want to do the job right. Service bureaus will love you, printing houses will get the job done for you as you expect, and you'll save money over the long haul.

If you've gotten to the point you are looking online, you have a good idea what your options are. I've used Quark, PageMaker and InDesign professionally. Given the choice, I'll take Quark.

If you are a beginning designer, or expect to be doing design in your work (I work in communications, and design as a secondary task), then this is your best choice. Look on the job postings, and see that more places expect this application more than their competition.

There are some new features, and, depending what you are into, not all may be important. For me, I dig the tables and layers. I can do less work to do the same job.

The tables feature is less clunky than in previous versions of Quark. You can manipulate them more efficiently and cleanly, and have tables within tables within tables.

Layers are great for creating various versions of a document within the same context. Rather than create a bunch of master pages, the layers option is much handier.

Also very cool is the web-design aspect. It isn't quite Dreamweaver, but it has increased its capacity to be opened in Dreamweaver. Design in Quark, then open it in Dreamweaver. This allows better control within your graphic design department, especially in smaller businesses where the web guy is not necessarily a strong designer.

There is the XML export option, but I've not explored this. It seems to open the door for better online publishing, however, and is worth figuring out, especially in light of Quark's web design strengths.

I fully recommend Quark 5.0.

Anthony Trendl