In a statement dated June 10, Quark Inc. announced plans to begin shipping QuarkXPress 6 for Mac OS X the week of June 16. The announcement was made at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA because Quark's new version for Mac OS X is expected to prompt many creative professionals to move to OS X. QuarkXPress is used by more than 3 million customers worldwide, primarily in professional publishing.
“QuarkXPress 6 fufills two fundamental needs in the publishing industry,” says Quark president and CEO Fred Ebrahimi. “It gives you the creative tools to design what you can imagine, along with the productivity features you need to deliver on time and within budget.”
Among the productivity-boosting features are project files, which are collections of layouts that can vary in media type, size and orientation. Style sheets, colors, hyphenation settings, lists and other properties can be shared among layouts. With the new Synchronized Text feature, users can share content between layouts in a project. When synchronized text is edited in one place, corresponding text elsewhere in the project will be change simultaneously.
Other improvements make it easier to print projects that include layers, tag content as XML, and create tables. Other features include full-resolution preview and multiple undo capabilities and enhnacements to web-page design controls.
US list price of QuarkXPress 6 will be $1045. Users of Quark XPress 5 can upgrade for $199. The upgrade price is $299 for users of version 4 and $499 for users of version 3. (Quark: 800-676-4575; www.quark.com)