Quark Enterprise Solutions August 2018 Release

Consistent with our ongoing obsession to respond to our customers’ requests for new features and fixes, the August 2018 release of our content automation platform brings about advances to usability and output accessibility. Plus, with this release we roll out a brand new toolkit focused on accelerating speed to value. The toolkit includes Smart Content Designer and Smart Content Builder.

New Tool Kit Accelerates Time to Value

The Smart Content Toolkit provides a UI-driven approach to tasks which used to require code development. The new tools reduce the need for developer skill sets by simplifying content modeling and stylesheet development. This helps increase project velocity.

“The new Smart Content Toolkit accelerates the path to results by a time-order of magnitude: What used to take months can be done in a week, what used to take weeks can be done in days, and what used to take days can be done in hours.”

Jason Aiken, Quark Sr. Product Manager

Smart Content Designer

Smart Content Designer

This first release helps designers apply styles to enterprise publishing templates using the world-class layout power of QuarkXPress. Define new styles for enterprise document models, preview results, and drive new capabilities for personalization using metadata conditions.

Smart Content Builder

This public beta version allows information architects to rapidly build new content types in Quark Publishing Platform. Build new models with a user interface and enjoy the benefits of Smart Content, all without needing to know XML schema syntax.

Smart Content Designer

Updates to the Modules of Quark’s
Enterprise Platform for Content Automation


Publishing Enhancements

Delivers configuration options to generate XMP metadata properties in PDF output, tagged PDF to provide greater accessibility, and new publishing channels to help support UI-driven templates produced in Smart Content Designer; there’s also a set of new publishing channels designed to assist XSLT-savvy developers with a powerful approach to more easily map content to QuarkXPress styles. See our SDK for details.

API Enhancements

Provides new, optional API parameters to publish a specific asset version andits entire tree of referenced assets.

Infrastructure Modernization

Includes Oracle 12c database support, a SQL Server JDBC Driver update, CKEditor, and the PDF Box libraries to maintain currency and improve quality.

Platform XTensions for QuarkXPress and QuarkCopyDesk

Platform XTensions for QuarkXPress and QuarkCopyDesk features are now compatible with the latest version of QuarkXPress 2018. Also in response to feedback from beta testers we produced a Smart Content XTension to simplify installation for the new toolkit. Lastly, Smart Content Designer is packaged with Platform Clients to simplify installation.

Proofing Tools

Produce better quality content in over 48 languages using an all-new, high-performing spell checker and grammar checker which boosts authoring efficiency and provides greater control at no additional cost.

Tokenization Framework

Add rich authoring experiences for semantic tagging, cognitive recommender services, and more leveraging a new extensibility framework.

Collaboration Enhancements

We gathered feedback from everyday users to provide a better overall user experience for teams producing content:

  • Righthand Changes and Foot Notes panes auto-scroll to match the canvas cursor position
  • Comments in the canvas can be shown or hidden
  • Comments can be navigated using Previous/Next buttons
  • New comments appear in context in the Changes pane
  • Clicking in any comment, tracked change, or reference note will auto-select the appropriate item in the Changes or Foot Notes pane when the associated pane is visible
  • Accepting/rejecting changes now includes an option under the Review tab to automatically move to the next change
  • Configuration options help minimize time/date information in comment tool tips

Usability Enhancements

We took time to further improve the authoring experience based on customer feedback:

  • Added support for copy/paste of reference note and metadata content across multiple documents visible in separate tabs of the same Web browser
  • Made it easier to add new values to domain attributes at check-in or via the Properties pane
  • Added a configuration option to hide all region types in the paragraph combo box (visible by default)

Authoring Consistency

We added two features related to authoring consistency to help business users stay compliant with departmental style guidelines:

  • Support for managing case changes to text content. With a single click characters can now be set to UPPER CASE, lower case, Camel Case, or Sentence case
  • Support has also been added to maintain Microsoft Word preferences for managing smart quotes

Performance Enhancements

Speed is always a benefit, so we added these performance enhancements to the Business Documents configuration:

  • MS Word Reviewer for XML Author export performance has been improved by 50-90% depending on the number of parallel reviewers & content complexity.
  • When saving or checking-in documents, the document update is limited to modified components and delivered in parallel, significantly enhancing everyday user performance.
  • Leveraging the arbitrary schema supportin XML Author, August 2018 includes the first-ever release of Smart Content Schema, a feature designed to enable benefits of the new Smart Content Toolkit for net new projects

Compatibility with QuarkXPress 2018

QuarkXPress 14.x earned accolades for its many new features and enhancements which drive enterprise formatting power like spanning footnotes across multiple columns.

Accessibility Enhancements

Generate tagged PDF output and alternative text for images using the new PDF engine and URL parameters in this release, a significant milestone for content produced by Quark technology

XMP Metadata

Easily generate Title, Author, Subject, and Keyword fields to help enrich content consumption and retrieval.

Other Announcements


  • Deprecated database version: as announced during the March 2018 Update, the Oracle Database 11gR2 is no longer supported.
  • Deprecation plan: in a future software release, we intend to deprecate the current set of publishing channels in favor of the modular, more extensible, and easier to use model designated by the "Ex" suffix
  • Updates have been made to the 3rd party software list shipped with the software.
  • Older enterprise products are nearing their end of life for support, so please check our Knowledge Base and kick off your upgrade plan!

Additional Resources

Documentation › Blog › Knowledge Base Quark Forums