SAN FRANCISCO -- Quark announced the immediate availability of a public beta of QuarkXPress 7 on Tuesday. The beta shows off the new features of Quarkis professional page layout application. QuarkXPress 7 includes new features like alpha channel masks in TIFF and Photoshop files, non-destructive mask manipulation, advanced OpenType support, shared layouts, Job Jackets, and more. The beta is currently compiled for PowerPC processors, but representatives from Quark confirmed that a Universal version that supports PowerPC and Intel-based Macs will be available by the end of January.
Quark also released a free Spotlight plug-in that lets Mac OS X 10.4 users search the contents of their XPress 6 documents through Spotlight.
Both are available as downloads from the Quark Web site (XPress 7 beta / Spotlight plug-in).