What is QuarkXPress?

- [Voiceover] Let's start out by taking a minute to consider what QuarkXPress is, a little bit of its history, and what you can do with it. QuarkXPress is a page layout application with a long history that stretches back nearly to the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s. The first version of QuarkXPress was released in 1987, and the version that we'll cover in this course, called QuarkXPress 2016, is the 12th major version of the application. QuarkXPress was an incredibly successful product, becoming the dominant page layout application in use around the world in the 1990s.

In the 2000s, Quark lost market share to Adobe, and its competing page layout application, InDesign. However, QuarkXPress remains a powerful and feature-rich application which has been used to design and produce countless books, magazines, journals, newspapers, catalogs, and other documents for more than quarter of a century. Although lots of folks simply refer to this application as Quark, technically that's the name of the company, and QuarkXPress is the name of the page layout application which is just one of the products made by Quark.

In addition to QuarkXPress, Quark the company offers enterprise level publishing solutions, tools for web-based content authoring, XML authoring, and a solution for building apps with responsive and interactive content. So what can you actually do with QuarkXPress? You can design and output content in virtually any kind of professional print or digital publication. QuarkXPress has plenty of features to support high quality print projects, like CMYK colors, spot colors, color management and press quality PDF output.

Regardless of what kind of output you want, QuarkXPress has many features and tools for building complex layouts. The type and tables features allow you to efficiently format text and control typography with great precision. And there are tools for creating, arranging and transforming page elements as well as drawing tools, tools for working with imported images, tools for building components of long documents, like footnotes, and new in QuarkXPress 2016 is the ability to create native QuarkXPress items from imported PDFs.

Often content that you copy and paste from other applications like Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as Powerpoint, Word iBooks Author and others. And we'll look at all of the essential tools and features of QuarkXPress 2016 in this course.