Quark unveils its bid for multimedia dominance
Software developer Quark is to shift its focus from the desktop to a multimedia environment in a bid to consolidate its dominance in global publishing and design.
Software developer Quark is to shift its focus from the desktop to a multimedia environment in a bid to consolidate its dominance in global publishing and design.
Quark unveiled a raft of products last week aimed at enabling publishers to use the same content in printed and online formats and also announced end-to-end support for XML in its products.
Recent products include Quark Digital Media System, a digital asset management system that will allow publishers to use content in a variety of media, including print and on the web; Avenue.quark, which allows publishers to extract content from QuarkXPress documents and store it in XML; and QuarkWrapture, a design software with 3D visualisation capability.
A suite of ecommerce products including Mirim, a tool which enables in-depth analysis of web, email and marketing promotions, and eStage, a client/server system, will also be available for companies moving to the net.
The company will also release Quark XPress 5, the latest version of its flagship software, within a few months.
The changes were in response to customer demand, said Bronwen Turner, its director of marketing and communications. "Media independence will be central to Quark's new strategic vision and it will develop software to allow publishers to use the same content on printed pages and on the web," she said. Quark's vision for the future was to "create it once and deliver it anywhere".
"Media independence will free publishers from the costs involved in publishing content to multimedia," said Turner. "With the tools we've developed, publishers can create content once and deliver it in print, on the web, or to a variety of other media without the time, cost and workflow restraints that have hindered them before."
Quark is supporting XML as it provides the "key to media-independent" publishing, she said.