FormsX

Digicomp proudly announces the release of FormsX 6 for QuarkXPress 6.0 and 6.1 for both the Windows and Macintosh platforms.

QuarkXPress 6 represents a major technological advance for Quark, as it brings full compatibility to the Mac OS X operating system for the first time. QXP6 Windows delivers "official" compatibility with Windows XP (although QXP5 runs under XP also).

Due to the vast under-the-hood changes in QXP6, every single XTensions Module must be significantly modified and adapted for compatibility for this new release of QuarkXPress. There is not a single XT that is simultaneously compatible with both QXP5 and QXP6 due to the architectural differences. For this reason, if you're going to use QXP6, you must use FormsX 6 and no previous version.

With QuarkXPress 6 and FormsX 6, you may open files from QuarkXPress 4 and FormsX 4 directly. Of course, opening QXP5 and/or FormsX 5 files works perfectly as well. From QuarkXPress 6, you can downsave to QuarkXPress 5 format (one level down only). These files are fully compatible with FormsX 5 but NOT FormsX 4. In other words, if you have other machines (or clients) with QuarkXPress 5 (or even QuarkXPress 4.1), you'll be able to open and edit files downsaved from QXP6 so long as you're using FormsX 5. If you wished to open a QXP6 file in QXP4, you would need to first open the document in QXP5 and downsave to QXP4 format since XPress only allows downsaving one level at a time. All of this true regardless of platform (Mac or Windows).

Fortunately for users, the jump to QXP6 is an easy one to make. The user interface is nearly identical and there is no significant learning curve to overcome. You'll be acclimated in just an hour or two.

QuarkXPress 6 introduces the concept of "Layout Spaces" instead of the fixed-size document model. In a nutshell, this means that you are no longer confined to having only one size for your pages. This is great news for forms designers who often have this need for multiple page sizes and have had to compromise in the past by using the largest page size for all pages, and then using only a portion of the document size on the smaller pages. In QXP6, you no longer work with "Documents" but rather "Projects". The file suffix changes from ".qxd" to ".qxp" to make the distinction immediately recognizable.

Another interesting feature of QXP6 of possible interest to forms designers is the "Synchronized Text" feature. This new feature allows the same text 'content' to be used multiple times in the same "project", even allowing for different stylings to be applied in the different locations. When you update the text of one area, the text will automatically be updated in any other areas of the project (different pages, etc.) all the while maintaining potentially different style attributes for the different locations. This could potentially be used for legal boilerplates (or even small chunks of text) that are used in various places on a multi-part form, for example.