Quark launches aggressively into competing directly against Adobe InDesign product by launching a brand new redesigned QuarkXpress 8 application. Quark has redesigned the GUI, adopted a new marketing tagline,(“Revolutionizing Publishing. Again.”), added new pen and picture tools and perhaps most telling, acknowledged Adobe’s reach by incorporating additional support for Photoshop, first time support for native Illustrator files and implementing Flash authoring tools. The screenshot below shows the PSD Import dialog where, for the first time, Quark users can exercise some control over Photoshop layers, Channels and Paths.

QualityLogic has developed a comprehensive set of application test files (ATS-IF) for QuarkXpress 8 and have seen a number of interesting anomalies when printing to various drivers. When we print file #7 using any of the printers the gradient fill on page 2 prints as a rotated rectangle fill and does not paint the entire object. ATS-IF files are great ways to test your printer driver to what can be commonly exercised through QuarkXpress and other applications. You can click here for a QuarkXpress 8 Test Specification.