Quark Software Inc. released recently the December Update for QuarkXPress 2018. With this update, QuarkXPress 2018 adds new features to fully support Indic language typography.
The Value of Indic Support
As a global leader in graphic design and page layout software, Quark recognizes the need for full Indic language support, which is now offered as a free update to QuarkXPress 2018. In addition to supporting current customers, Quark sees significant potential to attract a new customer base with these new features.
“We see a trend worldwide, and of course in India, where customers prefer our perpetual – no-subscription – licensing model for QuarkXPress. Together with our partners 4C Plus, Clavis Technologies, Modular Infotech and Summit, we are excited to be able to serve the Indian market even better now with full Indic language support,” said Ramesh Yella, senior product manager for QuarkXPress. “Our partners are also offering professional OpenType fonts and additional software and services that are needed to publish in India, which will help customers get even more value from QuarkXPress.”
QuarkXPress customer Harsh Chaudhary, Director of Dainik Navajyoti, Jaipur, said, “Our designers love QuarkXPress 2018 for its faster performance and easy to use UI retained for many years. The native Indic support is a huge plus as we were waiting years for this support. In addition to hyphenation support, spellchecking is an added advantage. We look forward to exploring native HTML5 export capabilities with Indic languages. The perpetual licensing model of QuarkXPress gives us an opportunity to choose when to upgrade and it does not lock us into subscriptions end up paying with no added value.”
What’s in the December Update for QuarkXPress 2018?
To help customers in India publish in popular Indic languages, QuarkXPress 2018 now integrates with updated Unicode libraries and offers full support to Indic Unicode fonts. QuarkXPress 2018 now also embraces native OS features for keyboard input methods for Indian languages. It also supports analyzing and reordering characters as per Indic orthographic syllable boundaries; conjunct creation and glyph positioning; Hunspell hyphenation support for 11 Indian languages that offers spell checking and hyphenation methods; text input through keyboard; copy & paste and direct import and more.
The key features are :
- Indic Text and Typography Support: Quark now offers core text and typography features in QuarkXPress to enable Indian publishers to build and publish documents in various Indian languages that support Unicode fonts.
- Support for Indic Unicode Fonts: Users can obtain Indic Unicode Fonts from font vendors like any other fonts (Latin script fonts) without having to use special XTensions to support keyboard mapping and other language features.
- Digital Publishing with Indic Fonts: With the native Unicode fonts support, now users can publish to HTML with digital layout capabilities within QuarkXPress. The digital formats include eBooks, HTML5 Publications and App Studio Apps.
QuarkXPress 2018 Indic Support Features Overview
- Integration with the latest Unicode and ICU libraries
- Indic language support for the following Indian languages: Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Odia, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Assamese and Gujarati
- Integration with Input Keyboard Methods (IMEs) offered by Windows and macOS platforms
- Support for Indic text typing, import, export and copy & paste
- Support for OpenType features offered by Indic fonts
- Spell checking for Indic languages
- Hyphenation for Indic languages
- Syllable based Drop Caps support
- Unichar based Indic text deletion
- Find/Change support for Indic languages
- Enhanced Glyph palette support for Indic languages
- Integration of font grouping, font fall-back, language locking for Indic fonts
- Integration of zero width joiner and zero width non-joiner support for Indic text
- Syllable based Kerning/Tracking support
Indic Support Free for Existing QuarkXPress 2018 Users
The December Update including Indic support is for both Mac and Windows versions of QuarkXPress 2018 and is free for all current QuarkXPress 2018 users. It can be downloaded using the built-in Auto Updater in QuarkXPress or downloaded here: http://www.quark.com/Support/Downloads/.
