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The recent JAGAT Page show, a annualearly February prepress rite, was a goodopportunity to catch up on recent develop-ments in the Japanese market. There wasnot much in the way of new hardware:Anything worth showing had been shownalready at IGAS or is still under wraps fora Drupa rollout. On the software front,though, there was plenty to see. Thebiggest announcement by far was theunveiling, finally, of Quark XPress 6.1J.Unfortunately, Quark pitched theannouncement so low-key that it soundedmore like a whimper than a roar.

Orient XPress. The official rollout tookplace at a free seminar hosted by QuarkJapan president Yoko Hayakawa, Quarkmedia house specialist Ajit Singh fromIndia and product manager HiroyukiNishimura. The first slide of the first pres-entation said it all: “Productivity vs. Cre-ativity”—guess which concept is Quark’smessage to the Japanese market. If thiswere a political campaign, the title wouldread: “Don’t change horses in the middleof the stream.”

This is not a bad strategy if the aim isto hang on to an established market share.But it doesn’t make sense for the Japanesemarket, where over 50 percent of prepressproduction is still done on proprietary sys-

tems. That market segment has a morebasic choice to make: What is the mostcost-effective replacement for our propri-etary system that still gives us most of thefunctionality we currently have? Theanswer is not Quark XPress 6.1J.

Quark’s product demonstration madeit abundantly clear that 6.1J is a simplelocalization of the current English product.There is not a single new Japanese feature(over the currently shipping product,Quark Xpress 4 J). This means there is stillno support of advanced Japanese Open-Type features such as extended charactersets; no advanced typography features(features that you get for free with Apple’sMacOS X Hiragino font and that areaccessible via the TextEdit application inMacOS 10.3); and none of the sophisticat-ed vertical layout you get with Adobe’sInDesign J.

The out-of-touch atmosphere wasillustrated in Singh’s presentation and com-ments: “Publishing on paper will continuefor the next 20 years.” “Quark is becom-ing an open company with an open heartand open mind.” And finally, “XPress isstill easy to use…The design is exception-ally good. The output is unmatched.” Thislast comment may be true, but after look-ing at the competition and Quark Japan’smarketing message,

we think the result may be one long, slowdecline for XPress in the Japanese market.

Canon updates Edicolor. Edicolor is aJapanese layout application with a longpedigree going back to 1993. At Page, thedevelopment team from Canon was onhand to show off the newest version. Edi-color 7.0 adds native MacOS X support,Unicode support and a new feature calledVirtual Font for printing legacy JapanesePostScript fonts that reside on the printerbut not necessarily on the computer. Thetable features are almost on par with InDe-sign J, and there are some original touchessuch as live linking with Excel data.

One interesting new feature, coming ina minor upgrade this month, is the abilityfor users to add custom-made gaiji charac-ters (special characters that fall outside ofstandard Japanese encoding sets) and editthe font-ID and name data directly. Edicol-or has never had the big marketing muscleof Adobe InDesign or the market share ofQuark XPress, but Canon has taken goodcare of its customer base. This has paid off,as big publication houses such as Recuithave chosen Edicolor for production.

The TNG co-marketing venture ofApple, Adobe, Screen and Morisawa wasout in force to help unveil Adobe’s newCreative Suite applications. The mostimportant of these was Illustrator CS,which has gained major new Japanesefeatures. In addition to full OpenTypesupport, advanced typography andsophisticated settings for Japanese punc-tuation and line breaks, there is the abili-

Quark, Canon, Adobe jostle for Japanese market share

XPress 6.1J was a yawner, but Canon’s Edicolor sparked interest.

Adobe’s Creative Suite debuted, too, catching our eye with new

typographic functions in Illustrator CS.

Volume 3, Number 23 • The Seybold Report • Analyzing Publishing Technologies 21

At last. QuarkXPress 6.1J is finally to be shipped in the late spring. Will itmake a difference in light of the rich Japanese features of InDesign andIllustrator CS?

Composite controls. Edicolor had composite-font settings long beforeIllustrator added them.

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ty to create composite fonts. Japanesedesigners like to mix-and-match fonts in asingle style: one font for Japanese charac-ters, a western font for Roman charactersand yet a different Japanese font forJapanese Hiragana and Katakana scripts.Illustrator CS handles this easily. Morethan InDesign, Illustrator CS will proba-bly deliver the promise and power ofJapanese OpenType to the averagedesigner and drive the OpenType fontupgrade cycle.

Another year, another font-encoding specificationThe last day of Page had a conference ses-sion on Japanese font-encoding with a dis-tinguished panel of font experts fromApple, Microsoft, NTT and Kyodo News.There was a lively discussion of the forth-coming Unicode 4.0 specification and afew new tweaks to the Japanese IndustrialStandard (JIS) X 0213:2004. Microsoft,predictably, plans to ignore Adobe’s Asianencoding efforts (AJ 1-4 and AJ 1-5) and tofocus on Unicode for Longhorn, whileApple will be on friendly terms with bothstandards.

Apple’s Yasuo Kida made the interest-ing comment that Unicode is sometimesweak in dealing with context. In Japanese,as in a few other languages, the differencebetween a glyph and a character is notalways clear: Sometimes a character is acharacter; but, in a certain context, it is

22 March 15, 2004 • The Seybold Report • Analyzing Publishing Technologies

Advantage of OpenType. A side-by-side comparison of OpenType in the Adobe Japan 1-4 character set(above) with the Adobe Japan 1-5 character set in Mac OS X’s Hiragino font (below). There are manymore glyph variations available, which can be a real timesaver when creating flyers.

Framing the data. One nice feature of Edicolor, not found inInDesign J, is the ability to specify a frame around a textgrip.

High-end type. Among other improvements, Illustrator CS adds sophisticated punctuationand line-break control.

At Drupa, Creo will show a VLF product,Magnus. It has many similarities to theTrendsetter VLF, but it has a smaller foot-print. (But it still takes more space than thecompetitive machines from Agfa andScreen.) Automated plate loading has beendesigned in from the start.

Magnus will be available in four mod-els: the 4570, 5183, 5570 and 6383. Eachmodel number indicates the drum size ininches. The Magnus 6383, at 63×83 inch-es, is the largest VLF machine available.Magnus will be offered at three speedgrades, the fastest of which can expose 15full-size (up to 80.7×59.4 inch) plates perhour. Alternatively, it can load two B1plates at a time and thus crank out 31plates/hour. Creo claims that this is thefastest fully automated CTP device on themarket, although we believe that both the

Agfa Xcalibur VLF XXT and the ScreenPlateRite Ultima 32000Z may be faster.

Spotless. Spotless is Creo’s approach toeliminating the use of spot-color inks.There will be two versions: Spotless 4 forCMYK and Spotless X for five or morecolors. The process is built around two ofCreo’s core technologies, SquareSpotprocess control and Staccato FM screen-ing. The Spotless software accurately pre-dicts on-press color within the prepressworkflow and automatically converts spotto process colors, taking printing condi-tions (press, paper, ink) into account.

Spotless will have plenty of competi-tion from vendors in packaging and fromAgfa, which has been offering Pantone’sHexachrome. It will be interesting to com-pare the results of all these products.

Gravure. Creo has a joint developmentpartnership with Italian supplier Acigraf toproduce the Exactus thermal gravure sys-tem. Exactus uses Creo’s SquareSpot imag-ing at 3,200 dpi to expose a mask on thecylinder, which is then chemically etched.

In the Exactus process, a blank coppercylinder is coated with a thermal resistcalled Graviti. This compound is similar tothe thermal mask that Creo developedwhen it attempted to break into the print-ed-circuit-board market. The resist is non-ablative and white-light tolerant. Afterexposure, the excess resist is dissolved in awater-based solution and the cylinder isconventionally etched.

The system is claimed to reduce thedensity-management and depth-controlproblems that gravure is heir to, and toreduce the cost of cylinder preparationcompared with engraving systems. It isalso said to be faster than engraving sys-tems—and advantage that will be moreapparent for large cylinders, because theetching process is the same for large andsmall cylinders.

Andy Tribute

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also a glyph variation. Kida proposed hav-ing a ideograph variation selector to helpdefine the difference between glyphs andcharacters.

It was clear that Japan’s font expertsare ready to throw in the towel. JIS X 0213

will probably be the end of the line forhomegrown font-encoding standards.There will be tweaks (2001, 2002, 2004,etc.) but no major new effort. One Japan-ese font designer said, “Many Japanesefont people fought Unicode for a long

time, but they can’t anymore.” It was amatter of pride, but from now on, Unicodewill lead the font-encoding parade.

Adobe does a favor. Behind the scenes,there was talk of yet another Adobe Japancharacter set, AJ 1-6, which will probablyincorporate Unicode 4.0 and the U-Presscharacter set for newspapers. To our eye,Adobe is doing the Japanese font industry,and the users, a big favor by publishing afont-ID specification rather than lettingeverybody stumble over each other withprivate ID mappings.

Adobe is also working on a character-creation InDesign plug-in for the Asianmarket that should do well in Japan. Thehigh-end market always needs better gaiji-creation tools, but only Adobe has thedeep pockets and talent to deliver one.Making it part of InDesign CS will onlyincrease its power in the Japanese market.The tool should appear with the next CSupgrade, which is due in the summer of2005. The file format of InDesign CS isalso due for a makeover, and it is said thenext one will become XML-based.

Joel Breckinridge

Volume 3, Number 23 • The Seybold Report • Analyzing Publishing Technologies 23

Better composites. The Illustrator CS Composite Font Preference dialog is sleeker than Edicolor’s.

Creo to debut third-generation VLF imager, spot-colorworkflow, gravure system

Magnus was designed for automation from the start; exposes plates

for the largest available offset presses.