The other day I was laying out a data-heavy table in InDesign. The bottom row was supposed to contain sum totals of the numbers in each column, but I didn't have those figures. All I had was the client's Microsoft Word file containing the original columnar data, and no sums there either.

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Adobe Bridge, the free digital asset management program that comes with any Creative Suite product, is one of my favorite programs. When I'm working in InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator, it's indispensable for quickly finding, previewing, and organizing all the files involved in a project.

Just like the Finder or Windows Explorer, you can use Bridge to find, organize, rename, and open any file on your computer.more >

Assume that the good folks at Quark have written up a number of free PDF white papers for QuarkXPress 7 users. Let's say that each white paper covers a complex topic specific to the new version, like Transparency or Job Jackets or Color Management. Primary source information available nowhere else.more >

Last week during the InDesign Conference: Master Class in Seattle, one of the seminars I presented was called "Repurposing: Print to Web." If there ever was an exercise in frustration, it was trying to come up with content for this seminar. I spent weeks fretting about it, scouring the web for an answer that wasn't there.

How do you get content that's sitting in a regular InDesign layout file out onto a web site? Other than making a downloadable PDF? Or copying and pasting text from frames to text editors?

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Quark released QuarkXPress 7.01 a few weeks ago, a free update to version 7.0 that came out in the spring:
http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/701update.html

Careful reading of that update page, though, shows that it's not actually an update. It's simply the Macintosh "universal binary" version of QuarkXPress 7.0. There are no new features or fixed glitches.

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Lost in the confusion about multiple betas of QuarkXPress v7 released one right after the other (if it's Tuesday, this must be a Quark beta — obscure old movie reference, sorry kids) is the news that they've done something NEW with their free tryout version.

In the past, I've always distinguished Adobe free tryouts from Quark's with this rule of thumb: Adobe tryouts are full-featured programs that expire in 30 days; Quark tryouts never expire but they're hobbled — you can't Print or Save from them.

Starting with QuarkXPress 7, that's no longer true. more >

Adobe staff members have been blogging merrily away for months now, I’ve cited some of their posts in previous issues:
http://blogs.adobe.com/blog-list.html

But whither Quark? Why haven’t they jumped on the bandwagon?

Why, they have, but quietly, on little cat-feet, and tentatively, like they’re not sure what a blog is for:
http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/seven/blog/

I’ve been monitoring this page since the first post went up in March, hoping at some point it’d really take off. Sometimes weeks will pass without a post, and I’m sure I’m going to get a 404 Not Found error when I mosey by for a visit. But nope, it’s still hanging on by its fingernails.

It feels like they’re so close to turning around their corporate culture, opening up communications with end-users, taking the leap into the Web 2.0 world, but they’re … just … not … quite … there yet.

If they’d allow comments — even moderated ones, like Adobe’s — you can be sure I’d be posting “that-a-boy, Quark!” comments to the entrepid writers, Marc Horne and Jonathan Ferman.

I know Marc’s a DesignGeek subscriber, so I’ll say it here: At-a-boy, Marc! Keep writing!

In between projects, I've been exploring the second version of the QuarkXPress 7 beta (released March 31 and good till May 2, 2006):
http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/seven/register.cfm

Most of all, I'm enjoying stumbling on various new features that are barely mentioned — if ever —l in the "What's New in QuarkXPress 7" promotional content on Quark's site. I'm not sure why they don't mention these things, if I were them I'd put every damn new feature next to a big fat blinking bullet no matter how minor.

Here's my latest discovery: There's something new you can do with black-and-white or grayscale TIFFs.more >

In case you've been busy working instead of surfing the web and reading non-essential things, you might have missed the fact that Quark has created a "public beta" of QuarkXPress 7.0 available to anyone who feels like testing it out.

It's free, it's fully enabled (yes you can print from it), and you don't need to own any previous version of QuarkXPress to run it. But since it's a beta — a close-to-final test version — expect a bit of bugginess and crashiness. It's not meant for actual production work at all, just testing. The beta expires on March 31, 2006, which hopefully means the official release will follow shortly thereafter. more >

All my articles, books, and podcast about Adobe InDesign aside, I still occasionally do jobs in QuarkXPress (when my client needs a QuarkXPress file back) and once in a while find myself teaching version 6.5 to 4.0 veterans. So I try to keep up with the program … my radar's always up for new information and resources to help myself and my students out.

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