According to US-based Quark, the new features in QuarkXPress 9 fall into three categories: digital publishing, design-driven automation and productivity production improvements.
Gavin Drake, vice president of marketing at Quark, said that the software was aimed at businesses looking to add value-added marketing services to their clients.
"This would certainly represent an opportunity for printers to be able to do do that," he added. "To be able to not just output whatever the publication is in print and online, but to provide digital editions of that for their clients too."
Digital publishing is one of the main focuses of QuarkXPress 9, which includes tools to allow designers to create content for print, web, interactive Flash media, and digital devices in a variety of formats.
According to Drake, the software sets a new benchmark in terms of making digital publishing, for platforms such as smartphones and tablet computers, both easy and cost-effective for creative professionals.
"Right now, nobody is doing that, either in terms of making it easy or cost-effective," he said. "QuarkXPress 9 puts creative professionals in control of creating digital publications for the iPad, for the Blio e-reader, for the ePub format, without having to get development companies and programmers involved."
App Studio for QuarkXPress 9, which will be available as a free update within 90 days of QuarkXPress 9 shipping, will give designers a dedicated design environment for creating content for the iPad.
It enables the repurposing of existing content and the design of new content specifically for the iPad, including video/audio players, slideshows, scrollable regions, web overlays, pop-up windows, buttons and hyperlinks.
QuarkXPress 9 is also claimed to be the only page layout software with direct support for the free, multi-platform, multi-device Blio eReader, which presents eBooks just like their printed versions, in full colour.
The desktop publishing software also includes the ability to export to ePub, the open source e-book standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. This allows designers to create text-based eBooks and publish them to e-bookstores including Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble NOOK, and Amazon Kindle.
In addition to the new digital publishing features, Quark has added a number of tools to help automate the design process.
These include conditional styles – a rules-based tool for automatically styling content; bullets and numbering – a Microsoft Word import- and export-compatible feature that makes it easier to format ordered and unordered lists and complex multi-level outlines; and callouts – a tool to allow boxes and groups to move automatically with the text.
Drake said: "These are all things you could do already but you had to apply and set up manually, so anyone that's doing the kinds of documents that are impacted by these features is going to save huge amounts of time."
Other productivity improvements include ShapeMaker, a tool for easily creating unique shapes, ImageGrid, to import and automatically build grids of images, Linkster, to unlink/relink text boxes without overflow, Cloner, for cloning design elements, and Style Sheets, to apply style sheets without affecting local formatting.
QuarkXPress 9 will ship in April 2011 and will be priced at £779 for a full licence and £279 for upgrades from QuarkXPress 8 and 7. Any customers that bought QuarkXPress 8 after 1 January 2011 is entitled to a free upgrade to QuarkXPress 9.
See tomorrow's PrintWeek (25 February) for a Star Product feature on QuarkXPress 9.
