QuarkXPress 2025 is a big upgrade which has got something for everyone. What I love most about the new features is that they transform the entire application by the way everything is integrated.
Quick Access Bar
The first thing you’re going to see is an interface enhancement that gets more powerful the more you use it. But, if you don’t like it, you can turn it straight off.
It’s the Quick Access Bar which floats depending on what you’re doing. You can pin it, if you want, and you can also switch it off. More usefully, you can tell it which features you want. When it doesn’t have any of your chosen features for what you’re doing, it disappears until you click something it can respond to.
When you click on a Text Box, it gives you Font Weight, Size, Box Color, Box Outline Color, Outline Width, Import and Open Type.
Click on a picture and you lose the text formatting features but gain access to Picture Fitting, the Image Editing Palette and the Picture Links. If it’s a greyscale image, you also get Image Coloring.
I find a lot of times with most applications that I’m repeatedly clicking something. The annoyance of having to go up to the menus again and again or a complicated key combination builds up pretty quickly.
You can also reorder how the things appear. It’s a clever addition and you get used to it very quickly.
It’s like a visual version of the Contextual Menu, which you can still access as before with ctrl-click on a Mac or right-click on a PC.
Style Groups
The feature that really caught my attention on QuarkXPress 2025 was Style Groups. There’s a little icon to allow you to create a group, and you can then drag styles in there, or, indeed, duplicate the group.
You might be thinking. There’s another icon here. What does it do? When you click on this play icon on the right, BANG! You just changed all the styles in the layout.
You can have as many groups as you want which is highly useful for when you’re working with different designs for a document with a client or preparing different editions of a book.
Markdown Language
If the names of your Style Groups aren’t the same, if you have set the Semantic Headings in the Paragraph Styles, it will follow those. This is interesting when you want a document for eBook and for web, because the semantic headings apply across different media.
Now there’s something even bigger. If you import a document in Markdown Language with headings set, you can then apply a Style Group and it will reformat the entire document.
Anyone can learn how to do headings in Markdown Language in about five minutes, and it’s a standard that lots of people already use. As long as your stylesheets have semantic headings, QuarkXPress will locate these in the Markdown text and apply them, deleting the markers.
Local Colors Tab
One of the things that have helped two generations of designers produce consistent color is the QuarkXPress swatch system.
Do you sometimes want to just play with color, or even have local colors just because they look right? Now you can.
The local color palette lets you make new colors and have them appear onscreen as you do it. It’s nice to play with, but the real power comes when you move to RGB, CMYK and HSB to LAB color.
LAB is an extremely powerful color model that’s hard to explain, but once you start playing with it, it’s superb for coming up with color combinations. It works in three dimensions — lightness, A and B, which would be hard to manage. LAB mimics the way your eyes work better than any other model.
You can pick colors from a photograph or anything else on the page, and you can also enter HTML values. As a bonus, if you pick from something which has an HTML value, it will tell you what it is. You can leave it as a local color, or convert it to a swatch.
Rounded Corners
Something else you’ll like is the ability to manage the curvature of boxes on screen. You can shift click to change the type of corner.
This might not immediately seem particularly useful until you start to see how different elements interact. Let’s take a dotted line, for example. Without the onscreen control, you’d spend a long time messing with the measurements palette to get this exactly right.
Now start playing with the border width courtesy of the Quick Access Bar, and things become much more interactive.
Real Time Spell Check
Now you can see your spelling errors in real time, when you click on a misspelt word, QuarkXPress makes better suggestions than most applications, and it organizes them into the main words and subsidiary words.
You can choose to add to Dictionary or ignore all, and it’s fully integrated with the Document Spell Check. If you don’t want it, you can turn it off in the settings.
But even if you don’t intend to edit spelling, the live Spell Check gives you more information than you might think.
Now imagine I’m working in six languages on a very long, very famous book, including Ukrainian, which I can’t read at all. What you should do is set the character style to the correct language.
Nested Projects
What else is new? You can now import a page from another QuarkXPress project. Editing it opens the document itself in QuarkXPress. This way you can nest and interlink documents.
Automatic Hyperlinks have been enhanced to include other protocols such as mail to.
You can now export IDML Packages, preserving everything including document fonts.
Font Collections
With all the Google fonts and everything else we get to play with, it’s getting harder to manage your brand fonts. Are we using Adobe Garamond, ITC Garamond or Cormorant Garamond?
If you work with several brands, this gets more and more confusing. Getting it wrong we all know this —can produce results which gradually destroy credibility by being not quite right.
The font palette has been improved in a couple of ways, but the most important one is Font Collections. As well as favoriting fonts, you can now put them into groups and then display only the fonts in your group.
For speed, simplicity and preventing errors, this is a feature which, again, seems simple and obvious, but will pay dividends again and again.
Let’s Recap
With onscreen controls the Quick Access Bar, Local Colors and the Rounded Corners tool. You can now work on the document much more directly than before.
Style Groups open doors for automating extensive text and allow you to work up several different layouts, either to show a client, to use in your creative process or because you are producing differing versions of the same text.
The real time Spell Check is more powerful than most and it crucially assures you that you have the right language set. That’s import for hyphenation and for correct Markdown of documents for the web and ebooks.
Font Collections put power for external font managers into your workflow.
And then there’s IDML packages, a revamped font system, and my favorite of the ability to import a QuarkXPress project.
All these work at a deep level throughout the system. We all know that productivity is creativity and creativity is productivity.
The faster you can work, the more time you have to think creatively. The more you are able to work creatively the faster you’ll progress to the final result.
