Who is king of the DTP world? In the 1990s it was Quark; this decade Adobe InDesign took over, but the new QuarkXPress 8 could take the crown back. In case you don't know already, pretty much every magazine you read will have been made with InDesign or QuarkXPress. But while Adobe took InDesign from strength to strength, Quark seemed unable to pull something really new and good out of the bag. Until now, that is.

Granted, if you don't lay out pages for a living this won't affect you directly, but it's still a hugely important thing in the professional publishing world. The rest of us can carry on with Apple's Pages, the open-source Scribus or whatever more affordable page-design software you prefer, but the fight between QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign will lead the way for all the other layout software on the market.

New look

The QuarkXPress interface is radically different in appearance; it looks really at home in Leopard – shading and shadows make the tools and palettes feel soft on the eye, and even the edge of the page on the 'pasteboard' looks like a real shadow rather than the blocked-out line of old. Many users will spend a lot of their working day in this program, so it's important that it looks and feels like an elegant, well-built tool.

Working with it is better, too. The Tools palette that experienced users will know like the back of their hand has changed – but in a good way. There are fewer tools on display, they're more logically organised, and they're also smarter than before.

The Text Content tool icon is also a fly-out menu that contains the Link and Unlink tools for flowing text between different boxes. The Bézier Pen tool is a fly-out menu, and it contains a total of seven related tools. But this doesn't mean you have to click-wait-drag to get the tool you want. Each Tools palette icon has a single-key shortcut, just like those in Adobe's Creative Suite software, and using it repeatedly cycles through the items in the fly-out menu.

Putting layouts together is a more flexible process. The last big update to QuarkXPress brought support for importing native Photoshop files, complete with the ability to mess around with individual layers in those images. Okay, you can't reorder them – but you can hide and show different layers, ink channels or paths as you like, and change the opacity and ink blending modes of individual layers.

This hasn't been enhanced, but to be fair this is still a little ahead of InDesign's Photoshop file support. What's new here is native Illustrator file support. You can import a regular AI graphic as if it was an old-fashioned EPS, and you get a better preview, too. Unfortunately you don't get access to layers in your Illustrator graphic, but the key benefit is not needing to make exported versions of graphics for your layouts.

Import options

QuarkXPress now supports drag and drop for importing from Finder, Adobe Bridge, iPhoto, and elsewhere. That's right, it couldn't do this before now – but it has finally caught up. And once you've switched to the new Picture Content tool by double-clicking a graphic, you'll see areas outside the container box as a ghosted image, and handles appear to let you resize and rotate the image.

But hold on, this is more than just a print design tool – the web design features are surprisingly competent! This shouldn't be seen as a real substitute for serious web-specific design tools, but you can make very competent web layouts with a fair degree of fine-tuning control.