QuarkXpress 7 (Mac)

List Price: $899.00 Discount Price: $1,295.00

Features:

• Brand new full retail box.

Customer Reviews:

Significant upgrade, get it if you use Quark [Posted on 2006-08-30]
This upgrade is a must-have if you are a Quark user. Here's the good and bad, from my view:

Good: Onscreen text rendering is vastly improved over previous editions. What you see is what you get ... for real.
Good: Transparency and drop shadows, very cool and feature rich.
Good: Menus and tools are much more organized onscreen, making visual real estate more streamlined and tools easier to reach.
Good: They give you a 30-day trial to try the package, and it's the whole package so you can do real work. I hate trials that don't let you save. How can you test an app if you can't really use it? Quark gives the whole enchilada, at least for 30 days, so you can test it for real.
Good: If you do get an error when printing, instead of just canceling the print job like previous editions without telling you the problem, this one will at least throw up a message telling you specifically which graphic is causing the hangup. Small and appreciated change.
Good: It just feels zippier. Not sure how to quantify that, but I like the "flow" better than 6. Subtle but real.
Good - kinda: The two biggest changes, in Quark's mind at least, are the addition of composition zones and job jackets. These basically allow multiple designers to work on a single project and not screw it up. That's great for large design firms, but for a small shop like mine, it's pretty irrelevant. I don't use these features. Despite this, this upgrade is still more than worth the price.

Bad: Still crashes sometimes, but what program of this complexity doesn't. Actually crashed more often, but that was because my computer had only 1GB of RAM. I upped it to 2GB, and problems gone. This version is heftier on the RAM than 6 was, but that shouldn't be considered a bad thing.
Bad: PDF support is still so-so. It seems a little better than before, but not by much. I still output as a .ps file and use distiller, as opposed to going directly to a pdf output.
Bad: If you use drop shadows or transparency, it will take longer to print. Not a big deal really. It's a trade off. When you use drop shadows, they show up on screen in real time, which is nice. The trade off, however, is that they are rendered when you print, so that's when the processing occurs. The downside to this is, that the shadows will render every time you print, as opposed to rendering once and being done. An extension like shadowcaster would render the shadow when you made it, creating a graphic, but then the rendering was done. Of course, when that occurs, you cannot change the shadow without re-rendering. Although this does create longer print and .ps file generation times, I prefer this implementation because it makes actual design faster.
Bad: Problems can crop up when you make shadows. The final product may have postscript artifacts if the shadow comes close to text or other graphics. I understand this is a problem with virtually all programs that use transparent objects, since postscript does not understand transparency and will rasterize vector images like text. You have to be careful when using shadows because of this, and proof cautiously.

Quark 7.0, Buggy doesn't begin to cover it. [Posted on 2006-10-20]
I was incredibly excited to upgrade to Quark 7.0 from 4.01 earlier this year. I hadn't had such a major upgrade for such a long time because frankly, Quark 4 did everything I needed it too. But I upgraded my computer to the newest dual processor Intel Mac mini and with that my ability to use Quark 4 died. I wasn't thrilled about shelling out the dough for the program but it was necessary if I was going to do page layout projects for my clients.

Well when I finally received the packaged and installed it I was rarin to go and try out how great this new version of Quark would be. I am in a word, disappointed. The other reviewer has said this program is a bit buggy but underscored it by saying what sort of complex program is not buggy. Well, I'll agree with that to an extent, but this program is incredibly buggy and I am not content to just say "oh well, it's a complicated program" and forgive Quark for it. If you plan to sit down for any length of time with this program and do work that you indeed would like to keep I suggest you save OFTEN and by often I mean probably every 5 to 10 minutes to avoid having work lost. I have not even utilized the new features yet and still I am encountering frequent crashes. The computer I am running is a Mac Mini 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2 Gigs of ram and using the most up to date version of OSX (10.4) so I would hope that the specs are good enough for the program to work seamlessly. Unfortunately this is far from the case.

There is one thing that I will give Quark, they offer free tech support and for that I am grateful, because it is necessary. I have utilized the help line numerous times already and while I hate having to call, I am glad I am able to when I need help fixing what shouldn't be broken in the first place. Unfortunately, even the tech support people don't seem to know how to fix your problem some of the time. I had problems with Quark not being able to auto-image a TIF I was using and I called tech support to find out what I was doing wrong. The guy told me that they know that runarounds may not work when you are using hyphenated text. Well, I'm no programmer, but I would think that a page layout program should be work with every type of character that exists on the keyboard. I wasn't able to fix the problem by eliminating the hyphens so then after some time, the guy, exasperated, told me to take care of my clipping paths in Photoshop and then import them into Quark because apparently Quark couldn't produce its own clipping path for some inexplicable reason. Not really stellar performance in my opinion if the way to get a feature to work is using a work around that essentially ignores the purpose of the feature in Quark. Thank god for Photoshop in this case! I also could not create a library without crashing the program despite repeated attempts to. Should be relatively simple to do... afterall, I had no problems doing that with version 4! Other things make the program crash, such as copying and pasting, moving items around, and just about anything else you can imagine. It's a wonder to me that This version of Quark saw the light of day, it seems very rushed to market in order to get a version that is supposed to work with the intel Macs. If I had the choice I would dump Quark and go to InDesign, unfortunately one of my clients demands Quark since that's what they use. If Quark doesn't issue some patches and fast I will be surprised if they continue to keep any substantial market share. This program is buggy in a way I have never seen before.

Avoid if you can, if you can't then buckle your seatbelt and keep a packet of Tums handy, you'll need them.

Buggy as all get out [Posted on 2007-04-26]
I've been a loyal Quark user since v. 1. Like Andy Marks, I upgraded from an older program (5 in my case). That thing, like all previous versions I'd used, was rock solid, unbreakable. But I have had no end of problems with v. 7 -- and 7.01, 7.02, 7.1 and 7.2. Though crashes are frequent, many come completely out of the blue, randomly and inexplicably. However, I have had repeated and more predictable problems with "legacy" documents, things created in much older versions of the program. Doesn't matter that I've saved in 5; some files just crash the damn program. Exporting from 7 back to 6 (it's no longer a Save As) causes frequent crashes, and the exports are not reliable either. I have had much contact with Quark tech support -- they have been most accommodating, and are no doubt more upset with the engineers than I am.

Perhaps some of the blame can go to Apple for making people write complicated progams for their Intel platform. However, some apps (Acrobat comes to mind) are robust and speedy as Gonzales. Alas, Quark is the program with which I earn my living. InDesign is supposed to be able to open Quark files, but not in my experience; otherwise I might just defect, though I have no abiding love for Adobe either.

It's not pretty here in Mac/Quark 7 Land....

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