In XPress 8, you can quickly update a style sheet based on formatting changes you made to text that had the style sheet applied, using the Update button in the style sheet palettes-old news to InDesign users, but much easier than writing the changes down and then manually updating the style sheet. XPress 8 lets you define precisely how various characters overhang the left and right edges of text boxes, a common advertising technique.Ī related interface enhancement that designers will welcome is the ability to drag text and graphics from XPress 8 to the desktop or to other drag-and-drop–enabled applications such as The changes are subtle but make it easier to switch among all three programs. Quark has also changed the behavior of its Bézier drawing tool to work more like those of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. But the software’s dialog boxes and menus are essentially unchanged. XPress 8’s simplified user interface reduces the number of tools and simplifies palettes, and on the Mac, provides previews of pages for navigation. Plus, XPress 8 provides a live preview of your changes as you make them. But Quark one-ups Adobe by not segregating the Free Transform functions to a separate tool instead it marries them to the Item and Picture Content tools you use so often in XPress. Ironically, XPress 8 accomplishes this by adopting the approach of Adobe’s Free Transform tool, which lets you do several things to an object. You can now resize an object or its contents the same way. For example, XPress 8 lets you rotate an object with the Item and Picture Content tools that you frequently use rather than forcing you switch to the Rotate tool-there is no longer a Rotate tool. It’s done this by displaying far fewer tools: eight, versus 16 (in the Web layout) in XPress 7.3. Quark has avoided Adobe’s tendency to overcomplicate the interface, and instead has made its capabilities easily accessible without getting in your way. The new interface is simpler, cleaner, and easier to work with, and because of that streamlining, feels a bit faster too.
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