4/11/2023 0 Comments Popchar reviews![]() ![]() Another much-touted transparency feature of version 7 is that it is not just for a whole box, so you can do things like set drop caps as transparent without having to make them a text box with a runaround, like you would have to in InDesign. While sometimes it can be slow to build the transparent image from the alpha channel, once the initial blended image is cached, it is consistently faster to interact with. The cyan is showing through the image's transparency, which is set by the alpha channel. Am I promoting more shameless feature biting? Oh, yes. Particularly, the lack of hanging punctuation and cleaner paragraph-based text composing is something that is still sorely needed in XPress. Unfortunately, it's not enough to shake InDesign users, who have had all of these features and more for years now. If you're committed to using QuarkXPress, then the new rendering and type features alone makes it worth the upgrade in my opinion. Between this and more realistic color rendering for spot and CMYK solids, you feel like you're interacting with a printed document, not a program doing a very bad job trying to represent one. It's clear that Quark has worked very hard on the new text engine and it makes using XPress a lot more pleasurable. Users can now input Japanese, Chinese, and any other 2-byte language they feel like, without needing XPress Passport. With the new text engine also comes Unicode support and non-roman font support. You can add favorite glyphs, see Opentype alternates for selected text all while it intelligently updates to reflect the selected font. Again, it's nothing new, but it's a welcome change for QuarkXPress users. Well, with XPress 7, the OS X character palette now works, but they have gone and added their own Glyph palette. It was a sad testament to how dated XPress' text engine was. InDesign's Glyphs palette rubbed a bit of salt on this wound but I think the worst was when OS X came and provided its own amazing character palette and somehow XPress couldn't interact with it. ![]() In Mac OS 9 days, it was understood that you shelled out extra for PopChar to get access to a character palette. ![]() This is also one of those things that couldn't go missing from XPress for much longer. A non-breaking thin space is added to the favorites section of the Glyphs palette. ![]()
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