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.