Bringing improved tables to the table

QuarkXPress 7’s enhanced table features, which have always been designed to make both text and image placement seamless. New table grouping, table rotation, auto-fit, non-anchored continued tables and header and footer features have all been added. QuarkXPress 7 also includes a handy feature to select all even rows, even columns, odd rows, or odd columns in a table for formatting. This functionality lets users shade every other row in a table easily to improve readability. In QuarkXPress 7, users can also automatically resize table cells as necessary to accommodate data from an imported Microsoft Office Excel table.

In previous versions of QuarkXPress, users could synchronise the text in boxes between layouts in a project so that when they made a change in one place, it was immediately updated in all instances of that text. But it was not possible to synchronise formatting or synchronise pictures. QuarkXPress 7 expands the synchronising feature so that users can synchronise content and attributes both for pictures and for text boxes. Now, when users make a change in either the content or the format of a text or picture box, that change can occur throughout all synchronised instances in the document.

XDraw ups the ante

In short, there are a hell of a lot of new features with the latest release of this product. To list them all would not make interesting reading. So just one more… XDraw is a new rendering technology built into QuarkXPress 7. XDraw displays much smoother shape and text rendering, has improved anti-aliasing, and displays rotated text much more clearly. It also draws items faster onscreen, and it simulates transparency more accurately by tapping in to the system-level drawing capabilities of each operating environment.