In a coup for Quark Inc., Metro International said it would deploy the company’s QuarkXPress pagination software across all its 69 editions worldwide in a project slated to be complete in 2007.

Metro publishes free dailies, reaching more than 18 million readers, in 93 cities in 21 countries and 19 languages across Europe, North and South America and Asia. With that many editions, content sharing is key, and QuarkXPress 7’s Unicode support is the foundation of enabling that goal, said Michael Mendoza, Metro’s global IT director.

Michael Mendoza, Metro International's global IT director.
Photo: Metro International

Unicode is an algorithm that allows typographical characters from all the world’s major languages to be encoded in a single character set. The spec also sports compression schemes and other associated typesetting data.

“We have to be very careful when choosing technology,” Mendoza said. “Metro’s requirements are unique and challenging. Technology and partners must be capable of supporting Metro as a global organization - today and as we continue to expand.”

Collaboration key

Each of Metro’s editions carries a headline and local, national and international news in a consistent and accessible format, making the ability for Metro editors and writers to work together and share content critical, Mendoza said.

Collaborative features within QuarkXPress 7, notably composition zone and job Jacket capabilities, “will allow all Metro journalists and a network of freelancers to reach new levels of productivity and efficiency,” Mendoza said.

QuarkXPress’ close integration with the Macintosh platform, which Metro uses as its base publishing foundation, was another consideration.

“The combination of using Macs and QuarkXPress allows Metro to use the same systems and software across all our newsrooms, independent of language, fonts or designs,” Mendoza said.

Finally, Mendoza cited QuarkXPress’ multilingual support. “Quark has the language support we need today and we are confident that they will provide Metro with additional languages as we continue to expand,” he said.

That support helped swing Metro to pick QuarkXPress over rival Adobe InDesign, although Mendoza conceded the latter’s appeal to some editorial users.

“In fact, [InDesign] would have worked great for some of the Metro publications, but not all,” he said. “As a firm criterion for choosing the DTP partner, the product must support all Metro languages today and in the future. This, in addition to the late delivery of universal application support, made a decision to use InDesign too risky.”

Home-grown editorial app

Metro will use QuarkXPress in conjunction with its home-grown editorial app, the Metro Publishing System. The software allows each of its offices to view the editorial content of all other offices in the news feed, Mendoza said. MPS, itself based on XML and Unicode, was stitched to QuarkXPress and other editorial servers to facilitate the transition between page editing, editorial content and database storage.

“Since all were Unicode based, the integration was much easier,” Mendoza said. “We have big plans for the integration of Quark products with the Metro Publishing System - already we have the integration of QuarkXPress and DDS,” Quark’s Dynamic Document Server software. “The integration to Quark’s publishing platform, use of collaboration zones and JDF workflow are on the horizon,” he said.

Meantime, Quark announced the release of QuarkXPress 7.02, which the company said features more language support, including hyphenation and spell-check capabilities for various languages, including Polish, Greek, Croatian, Finnish, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish.

The new version also features license transfer functionality, which allows customers to deactivate and activate the software without relying on external resources, making it easier and more accessible for customers to transfer their licenses without contacting Quark. The app is available as a free upgrade to current version 7 users, Quark said.