After almost two decades of existence, Quark has become the basic building block of any print designer’s toolkit. It has deservedly gained a reputation for reliable printing, offering consistent and dependable output that prevents costly mistakes. Now you can confidently add that tool to your Mac OS X workflow, because QuarkXPress 6.0 is available now and runs beautifully under Mac OS X.

In this latest version, QuarkXPress 6.0 gains a new appearance and a new window menu that lets you quickly navigate between open files. But you’ll love being able to launch as many programs as you want, knowing that if one of them misbehaves, it won’t interfere with your QuarkXPress document. And with the advanced virtual memory in Mac OS X, other programs won’t impede your work by hogging valuable memory. Connecting it to scriptable applications such as FileMaker Pro gives you an automation workflow simply not available on Windows. But it doesn’t merely run on Mac OS X, it also offers significant benefits over previous versions of the software.

The new concept of layout spaces with synchronized text is awesome! Its documents let you manage your projects in one file, making it easier to generate collateral for different formats. So, you can design a billboard and a print ad and keep them in the same document. What makes this easier is the addition of synchronized text that lets you share a single pool of content across multiple boxes. No need to fret about making sure you’ve updated an incorrect phone number, or even worse, a price, multiple times across several documents. Once you’ve fixed it once, you’ve fixed it all over the place. You’ll surely appreciate the gains in speed, accuracy and efficiency synchronized text brings.

Other productivity enhancements are multiple levels of undo, and table and layer improvements. QuarkXPress 6.0 lets you undo actions that were previously irreversible, including text and picture import, text linking, and style sheet edits. You can now also do anything with a text or picture table cell, including using the synchronized text of a layout space. For the web, it offers more control over designing cascading menus, specifying font families for style sheets and creating rollovers. You’ll also welcome how it speeds through creating PDF documents complete with indexes and hyperlinks. Since the program doesn’t need to workaround the limitations of computers with little memory, you can now choose to view images at full resolution while working on a layout that lets you create more accurate clipping paths and magnify the image with minimal pixelation.

Truly, QuarkXpress has already become a part of the lives of computer professionals. It’s good to know that continuous innovation is being conducted for its constant enhancement in efficiency and effectiveness. I just hope that this people will continue to do such things for the future of our computer world, too.