Quark To Ship XPress 6 For OSX; Vows Continued Support For QPS

Quark Tuesday said it is finally ready to ship QuarkXPress 6.0, its flagship design application upgraded to run on Apple Computer's OSX operating system, and at the same time promised the publishing community that it will continue to support its QPS copy management program.

At Apple's headquarters here, Quark President and CEO Fred Ebrahimi said QuarkXpress 6 was released to manufacturing and should ship next week.

Ebrahimi also offered conciliatory remarks to a publishing community that has been stalled in its OSX upgrade plans for years while waiting for Quark to release the updated version.

"The truth of the matter is we should have done this earlier," he said. "My apologies to all of you for being late."

After the press conference, Ebrahimi told CRN that Denver-based Quark has reversed its earlier position to stop supporting its Quark Publishing System (QPS) and Quark Dispatch Server.

"We've changed our mind," he said. "There is such a strong feeling toward QPS."

The company said it has about 900 QPS customers and about 50,000 users.

A Quark spokesman said QPS will support QuarkXPress 5 by the end of this month. Support for version 6 and OSX will be released next quarter, and by the first quarter 2004 the company plans to upgrade Quark Dispatch for OSX, he said.

"Customers want us to do it, so we will be supporting QPS for a long time," Ebrahimi said when asked how long Quark expects to support the copy management programs.

Quark has had a history of changing its mind. At a November 2002 meeting of customers, Ebrahimi reportedly groused about Apple's market share and told attendees that the company would no longer support QPS.

But at today's press conference, the two companies appeared to have mended the relationship. "We promise you that we will continue working together to solve your workflow problems," Ebrahimi said.

At greeting-card company Hallmark, a transition to OSX for about 2,000 Macs has been completed now that QuarkXPress 6 is ready to go, said Barbara Null, portfolio manager for desktop publishing systems at Hallmark.

"One really important piece missing was QuarkXPress 6," she said. "It was extremely important to our migration plans."

In addition to native support for the OSX operating system, Quark said it has added a number of enhancements to QuarkXPress 6. The new application adds what Quark is calling "layout spaces" for sharing attributes and information in complex projects.

"Layout spaces" allow an artist to share style sheets, colors and other elements across a collection of layouts among a variety of print and Web pages, said Jurgen Kurz, Quark's vice president of product management.

A synchronized text feature also makes it easier to change text across a number of different layouts in the project, he said. For example, a headline could be synchronized so that if it is changed in one layout, it automatically is updated in the other layouts.

The new software also broadens the range of table-creation functionalities available and allows layouts to be output directly to PDF format, Kurz added.

The applications is priced at $995. An upgrade version for QuarkXPress 5 users is $199.