Quark XPress is simply the best
desktop publishing program in existence. It's used by most
professionals to do design ranging from
advertisements to
magazines and
newspapers. Known for its steep
learning curve and for its
power, anyone who's interested in working in the
print media ought to spend the time to learn it.
Common Objects
The most commonly used objects in a Quark XPress document are:
- Text Box
- Graphic Box
- Text Path
- Line / Rule- A rule is a line that is forced to be orthogonal.
- Guides- Guides are your friends
Features
Some of my favorite features include:
- Style sheets- When working on a newspaper, there are many repetitive tasks such as formatting stories, headlines, jumps, captions, pull quotes, etc. With style sheets, it's a breeze, and there are far fewer errors in formatting.
- Baseline grid- All lines of text on a page should be on the same line vertically. A baseline grid makes this task trivial by insuring that text can only go at specific places. It's hard to explain, except to say that without it, stuff would be a lot more difficult and require more precision.
- Keyboard shortcuts-There are keyboard shortcuts for almost everything. The most useful are the ones for making text bigger and smaller (option-apple-'>','<'). This feature alone makes the program insanely great.
- Document Masters- Standard layouts can be saved and reused. No more worrying that page numbers and document headers will be incorrect.
- Content libraries- Standard elements (feature boxes, photo boxes, reoccuring advertisements) can saved, and indexed and recalled easily by name.
I could go on forever about how
Quark XPress is better than
Pagemaker and
Publisher. Compared to Quark, everything else is a toy.
InDesign is decent, but now and again you run into issues with fonts and other
things just when you least expect it. Stick with Quark if you can.
I use Quark XPress while working on The Triangle, the student newspaper at Drexel University, and I do not know what I would do without it.
Note: There used to be a section in here labeled "Major Problems", but it was deleted since they were addressed in Quark 6.