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LONDON—At the TypoTechnica 2005 conference Thursday, Quark Inc. gave the first look at the next version of its flagship product, QuarkXPress 7, claiming the update will be “the most significant upgrade in the products history.”
In the historic surroundings of the St Bride Print Library, Scott Wieseler, product analyst in Quarks product marketing group, was joined by Quarks UK director of market, Gavin Drake, to give attendees an hour-long demonstration of the typographical support in the update, as well as revealing that the product will ship this year.
XPress 7 is “the biggest rewrite weve ever done, and the most significant upgrade weve ever done,” Drake said. To implement full support for both Unicode and OpenType, the company has done significant work rewriting its core text engine, compartmentalizing many parts of its code to make it simpler to add features now and in the future.
QuarkXPress 7s support for Unicode will include a significant new feature called Font Fallback. This allows users to specify that, if a font doesnt contain a full set of glyphs for non-Roman characters, it should fall back to using an alternative font rather than failing to display the imported text in full.