A new version of Quark’s XPress layout program was announced on the first day of the Drupa printing exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany. XPress 8 builds on the major revisions to the user interface and underlying structures introduced in XPress 7 in 2006. The company says that it worked with designers to analyse usage, and concluded that the new tools needed to be easier to access and use by visual adjustment rather than using numerical adjustment menus. For instance, the drop shadows introduced as part of XPress 7’s transparency suite can now be adjusted by live dragging rather than typing in offset measurements.

Hanging punctuation controls have been added for the first time. Unlike the rival Adobe InDesign layout program, character sets can be created with different amount settings or each.

The most immediately obvious change is a new look and feel for the user interface, in particular a revision to the main tools menu. A new Picture Content tool lets users grab, rotate and scale images without typing in numbers or switching between tools. The existing Item tool and a new Text Content tool have “smart” behaviours that mean less switching between tools – basically you double-click on the content of a frame to activate the relevant editing tool. 

Content, including images and text files, can now be dragged directly into an XPress page from the desktop or applications such as Adobe Bridge. Native Adobe Illustrator (.AI) files can be placed into layouts for the first time (Adobe already allows this with InDesign. Native Photoshop (.PSD) files are already supported in XPress 7.