Not only is QuarkXPress 2016 licensed on a traditional basis – you don’t pay any subscription or ‘tax’ to use it, unless you want additional support – but it now has a proper printed manual too: Martin Turner’s book Desk Top Publishing with QuarkXPress 2016 has been published by Ingenios Books, at a cost of £19.99/$28.77. Its ISBN is 978 1 5332 0023 5. It is listed on Amazon UK, and Amazon US, but is not available for Kindle, nor in the iTunes Store.

Its first seventy pages are intended for those new to publishing and to QuarkXPress, and take the reader gently through both.

The second part goes on to detail how to work effectively with QuarkXPress, offering rules for composition, typography, and colour, and how to work with print shops. Although this is integrated with features in QuarkXPress, it is relatively independent of publishing platform. This is followed by some deeper topics including job jackets and JDF, and XPress Tags.

The manual proper fills the remaining 130 or so pages. This works progressively through the tools, measurements, and palettes, before detailing each menu in turn. Screenshots and text cover both the Mac and Windows versions of QuarkXPress 2016 in a comfortably platform-neutral way, explaining their differences where necessary.

The book does not include detailed step-by-step tutorials, such as the article here about importing PDF as native objects, but does explain each feature and command fully, and is completely up to date for this latest version. Indeed its strongest recommendation is the fact that its author produced the entire book using final release candidates 1 to 3 of QuarkXpress 2016, which probably makes him the most experienced user outside Quark itself.

I have only had my copy for a day, sufficient to decide that its purchase was money well spent, and it is the manual that most users I am sure would want. QuarkXPress’s help feature is one of the best of any app on this Mac, but it is wonderful to have a real, physical manual which I can refer to, and browse when and where I want.

I strongly recommend it for all who are using QuarkXPress 2016.