In a welcome touch, you can drag the magnifying glass over a displayed page to exactly select the area to be shown when the page is zoomed. There are three new tools - for rotating objects, creating irregularly shaped picture boxes, and zooming the page image with a magnifying glass. The tool palette is no longer attached to the left side of every window but now floats above the page. QuarkXPress 3.0’s thoroughly revamped interface makes it a joy to use. 001 degree, either by using the mouse with a new rotation tool or by typing the exact amount of rotation you want. QuarkXPress now lets you rotate any object or group (either text or graphic) in increments as fine as. Although the parent/childbox arrangement is still available, users can opt to use the more flexible - and less confusing - option of permanently grouping objects as necessary. You can now select and permanently group multiple objects with the standard Shift-click command or by using the marquee tool. You're no longer confined to using cumbersome parent/child boxes when you want to associate objects permanently. You can even create objects that stretch across multipage spreads. You can also drag objects partially off pages to create bleeds, another former near impossibility. You can drag objects completely off a page and use the space outside the page as a pasteboard much like PageMaker's. The edge of each page is no longer the impenetrable boundary it once was. If you apply a new master page, the document pages instantly change to reflect the new master. When you change a master page, all the changes are reflected in every page based on that master. You can easily change the master page that applies to a particular page simply by dragging icons inside the new document-layout palette, which gives an iconic view of every page and master page in a document. Now you can have as many as 127 different retroactive master pages per document. QuarkXPress' default pages were always a poor substitute for real master pages.

First, here's a look at how some of the major complaints about earlier versions have been addressed. Version 3.0 bristles with wonderful new features, and the interface has been brilliantly redesigned. Quark has done more than just incorporating some of the enhancements users have been clamoring for and smoothing some of the more notorious rough spots. With its third incarnation, QuarkXPress has finally left behind its once-justified reputation as a powerful-but-daunting desktop-publishing program that made you play by its own rules - or else.

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