DQ Desktop Publishing Tools QuarkXPress

QuarkXPress is a well-known integrated publishing software launched by Quark in 1987. It is full-featured and can complete a variety of simple and complex typesetting tasks. In addition to the basic page layout framework and excellent text formatting tools, it also contains a number of easy-to-use features for a variety of publishing media. QuarkXPress combines professional layout, design, color and graphics capabilities, word processing, and sophisticated prepress operations. It is the earliest extension of the flexible Extension technology, through a variety of third-party extensions to achieve more powerful features. Since its introduction for a long time, QuarkXPress has taken a leading position in the desktop publishing industry, especially in the high-end publishing market, with its excellent design concepts, powerful typesetting capabilities, and advanced color processing capabilities. Earlier versions of QuarkXPress mainly run on top of Mac OS, and versions of Windows have been added since 4.0. The latest version is QuarkXPress 6.0.

QuarkXPress has different versions for different languages, and files cannot be exchanged between versions. This strategy has brought considerable profits to Quark, but it has also brought inconvenience to localized desktop publishing. Taking the CJK (Simplified Chinese/Japanese/Korean), the most common in Asian localization, as an example, to complete the work of four languages, four different versions of Quark are required, and different languages ​​cannot be processed in one file at the same time. . Today, from the operating system to the application software are all in the direction of supporting multi-language, support for Unicode, QuarkXPress this strategy will likely greatly limit their own development. The localization of the QuarkXPress software itself has also been slow. After finishing the simplified and traditional Chinese versions of 3.3 and 4.1, Quark basically stopped the development of the Chinese version. Since there is no higher Chinese version, the QuarkXPress project in localization can only be completed on the earlier Mac OS 9.

Western-style versions of QuarkXPress can export formatted text files via Extension Extensions such as CopyFlow or Trados's Story Collector for Quark. The tagged text file is processed by the translation software and becomes a new target language text file. After the file is reintroduced back to the original Quark file, all the text will return to the original text box position and keep the format unchanged. After further typesetting, the work can be completed. However, for the Chinese project, because the above plug-in does not support the Chinese version of QuarkXPress, only copying and pasting methods that are less efficient can be used to complete the typesetting work. Since different language versions cannot exchange files with each other, it is inconvenient in the post-processing of the files.

Although QuarkXPress has some limitations, it is undeniable that it is a very successful classic typesetting software.

Source: HC Network