Disaster Preparation Gregory Hines Macho Mac: G5 Unveiled Quark 6 Announced Designer's Jaguar Scorecard Choosing a Page Layout Program		The Designer's Transition to Mac OS X Finally! Quark 6 (for Jaguar) Announced by Fred Balin, fbalin@macresolutions.com with input from John Cruise Created: June 10, 2003 Modified: June 15, 2003   Completing its lumbering march to its own drummer, Quark, Inc. today announced a Mac OS X native version of its flagship product, QuarkXPress, now at version 6, a mere 27 months after the introduction of Mac OS X. Quark 6 for the Macintosh will begin shipping next week. [Note: Two days later, Quark backtracked indicating that initial delivery may be as long as six weeks.] Upgrade pricing as per the Quark site is vaguely listed as between $199 and $499 depending on the version you currently own. The full product via the Quark store is listed at $944. Online and catalog resellers will almost assuredly have better pricing. The release of Quark 6 removes the last major obstacle for a significant segment of the design and print community to seriously consider an upgrade to Mac OS X under Jaguar. We extensively covered the many benefits and few gotchas of this move in a session at our recent seminar The Designer's Transition to Mac OS X.   WHAT ELSE IS NEW? In addition to running natively within Jaguar, Quark 6 also includes incremental improvements over earlier versions. The final release is consistent with the features detailed by John Cruise in his seminar session Choosing a Page Layout Program for Mac OS X. In brief, they include: • Direct export to PDF version 1.3 (i.e., Acrobat 4 compatibility) • Layout Spaces, which enables sharing specifications and synchronizing text across various layouts • Multiple Undos Those who have made the switch to InDesign 2 or are at ease with Quark running within the Classic Compatibility Environment are already well on their productive ways within OS X. Now the Quark purists and those reluctant to change or upset a workflow must think again.   DO YOU UPGRADE NOW? Interestingly, the decision is not a slam dunk. Despite the compelling attractions of Jaguar and Apple's hopes for a massive immediate migration, an informed decision still requires reflection. Here's why: 1. QuarkXpress Only Runs in Mac OS X Under Jaguar. It will not run in Mac OS 9, as opposed to say, InDesign 2, Photoshop 7, and Illustrator X. Therefore to keep your Quark workflow in parallel, all users either have to move to Quark 6, or some will have to backsave into earlier versions. Quark 6 only backsaves into version 5, and you'll need a copy of version 5 to backsave to version 4. Go from 6 to 4 in one step? Not as far as I know. Also, during each backsave any content dependant on features exclusive to the new version will be altered. 2. Where's My Plug-In? Your older plug-ins will not work in Quark 6. They must all be rewritten unless their functionality has been incorporated into version 6. If your work relies on a special third-party plug-in, you may have to wait. Quark says that developers have been working on plug-ins for some time and they should be released rapidly. This does not match what I learned in a recent conversation with one such developer. 3. Is Your Commercial Printer Ready for Quark 6? Commercial printers had difficulties with early releases of Adobe's new product, InDesign. By version 2 however, released a year ago, the kinks with commercial printer RIPs had been worked out. And even if your commercial printer was not running OS X (and most still are not) they could easily print your file by running InDesign in Mac OS 9. This will not be possible with Quark 6, unless files are saved as PDFs, a desirable although somewhat complicated procedure to get the right results for final press output. 4. How Solid is Quark 6? Quark and many end-users had a miserable experience with the release of Quark 4. It contained a whole host of problems that were not resolved until the release of versions 4.1 and 4.11 many months later. With the release of version 5 things went smoother, and one of Quark's stated aims for the slow release schedule for version 6 is to get things right. We'll see. 5. Copy Protection Quark 6 introduces a new copy protection system that ties the software license to the unique hardware configuration of your Mac. Moving Quark 6 onto another Mac, say the laptop you take to the client, not only violates the license, but requires you to call Quark, explain the situation, and get a different code. Good luck.   BOTOM LINE All in all the Quark upgrade is excellent news and well overdue. It fills in a key missing piece in the Mac OS X mosaic and provides another compelling reason to switch to Jaguar, whether it be with Quark, InDesign, or even both.  We will follow up with additional information on Quark and other Mac OS X transition issues as they become available.
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