Affordable Prepress tools from the Quark Print collections

Quark continues to give consumers more reason to jump into Quark 7, and their October product launches were no exception. They launched their Quark Print Collection of prepress tools for imposition, the QuarkXPress Server 7, for producing Web–based or data–driven communication, and the Quark Interactive Designer, for creating Flash layouts for the web.

I had the opportunity to test the Quark Print Collection immediately, as they had a 30–day trial available on their website. It is available for Mac OS 10.4 and Windows XP and you will also need either Quark 7 or Adobe Acrobat 7 to install and run it.

The Quark Print Collection contains prepress tools for both Quark 7 and Adobe Acrobat 7. These tools for imposing pages work with a simple common interface and allow users to create imposed PDF or Postscript signatures. You can use the Quark 7 or Adobe Acrobat 7 print engines to print pages composite, separated, postscript, or PDF.

There are many benefits when printing directly out of Quark 7. First of all, the main XTension, Quark Imposer, does not change the original file in any way—all the imposition calculations are made at the print stage. The file can be saved as a PDF or viewed in the Preview window of Imposer. Settings can be saved and reused and so can custom marks. There are separate XTensions for Quark Item Marks and for Quark MarkIt, the former positioning marks on individual pages and the latter on the sheet. Marks are fully controlled and customizable, and the built–in bleed setting can be used to move the marks farther away from the trim area as required.

Printing directly from Quark also allows the user to print separations, adding Quark trapping when needed. Printing from Acrobat has the same interface for Imposer but Acrobat uses its own standard marks, which can only be altered after the file is imposed in a separate PDF file. You will benefit from any plugins you have in Acrobat including trapping, preflight, flattening previews etc.

If production personnel are already imposing pages manually in Quark, Imposer will thrill them. Binding types include Saddle Stitch, Perfect Bound, and Stacked as well as none for custom layouts. Imposer will create layouts for Work & Turn, Work & Tumble, Split Web, and Sheet Wise automatically and can control bleed, creep, and crossover. There is also a button to access the MarkIt control panel. Marks can be adjusted and customized to the job, and can be saved and applied on the fly.

Print Collection users can use the Imposer interface to set up and define a layout with required margins, gutters, and marks. The sheet size is determined by these items, as there is no place to define the actual sheet size; instead, the information window at the bottom of the Imposer interface will show all entered and calculated measurements, including sheet size. When printing directly to plate, the sheet can be positioned in the plate area using Quark’s print dialog. Users can also print to PostScript and then distill to PDF; the file can then be checked before it goes to proof.

There are a couple problems with both the Quark 7 and Adobe Acrobat versions of Imposer, which I hope to see addressed in future releases. The first is that the measurements are controlled by the Quark/Acrobat preferences; however, only the units in the Margins tab change, the rest of the measurements are always in points. You can enter items using the inch mark or mm but they are then converted to points. The second issue I had was a difficulty imposing landscape documents—a problem common to other imposition software as well. The existing rotation tool only rotates 180 degrees, instead of the 90 degrees needed for easier landscape imposition.

Anyone currently imposing their files in QuarkXPress should be able to use this XTension to impose their standard work. The price tag on the Quark Print Collection is $299US, which makes it affordable to get up and running. There is a 30 day trial available on the Quark website, www.quark.com, which should show you right away if this new Xtension will fit in to your workflow.   

Andrea Mahoney
TriBay Enterprise  T: 416-729-9687
E: andrea@tribay.ca
www.tribay.ca