QuarkXPress 2016: Faster, More Stable, With a New User Interface For Windows Users

First of all please excuse the potential text mistakes as English is not my native language.

I was privileged to test the Final Candidate of the brand new QuarkXPress 2016 layout software. It is already an impressive step forward showing the result of a great team of programmers.

The previous version brought a new engine running only on 64-bit machines, and now the UI was rewritten after a wide work for consulting either traditional or new QuarkXPress users. Rewriting Windows version made a very fast software and the few tests I made have shown me a highly stable software, even for memory consuming jobs.

BTW, Quark has a very useful Facebook page, a lot of worldwide users being in contact with Quark's engineers. Some days ago, Colin Edwards, a QuarkXPress user, wrote several nice words: " I am hugely impressed with the Facebook page.Most company Facebook pages are full of complaints but I love the positive attitude shown here from technical staffers and from the users. I only wish I had discovered it earlier."

Now, about QuarkXPress interface, the FC version adds the possibility to set the main color of the interface. A user can choose to set a grey or a light grey interface. It is a good setting which helps users eyes.

 Grey UI

Light grey UI

For setting the UI color one have to open the Preferences dialog box:

A new feature of QuarkXPress 2016 is the ability to dock the palettes:

With a right click on the title bar one can choose whatever palettes he needs.

Any palette can be opened also as usual, from the Window menu.
The measurement palette was also rewritten, it can also be docked and it have now more tabs which are sensitive to the kind of the selected item.

The modal dialog boxes have not disappeared, but one can input all his preffered values in the corresponding fields of the measurement palette without using of any further dialog box. The keyboard shortcuts are the same as in the previous versions, so this feature can bring a faster work.

Here are the tabs for a text box, from left to right: Classic, Text, Frame, Runaround, Character Attributes, Paragraph Attributes, Space/Align, Tabs and Drop Shadow. For each tab there are all input fields as found in the Modify dialog box.

For a picture box, the tabs are fewer: Classic, Frame, Runaround, Space/Align and Drop Shadow.

The new features of QuarkXPress 2016 have already been announced. For those who don't know them yet, there is a short video posted on Quark's channel from YouTube. All the brand new capabilities are making XPress a very special layout software, in my opinion the best software of its kind in the whole graphic market.



Quark have special pre-launch offers:
- you can buy QuarkXPress 2015 and you get QuarkXPress 2016 free, or
- there is a special upgrade pre-order offer for QuarkXPress 2015 users only: a reduced upgrade price.

The offers can be found here.