Is Quark 6.5 unreliable on Leopard?

[jimlin]

Our tech dept is hoping to up all Macs to Leopard. Plus, our Macs are getting outdated and need to be upgraded, which means Intel based systems.

Potential issues (overall, not just Quark) I see are this:
• our small comp dept needs to stay in Quark 6.5 for the time being, as the move to Quark 7 is not yet approved by the R&D types who determine what are vendors need to use for our products
• how bad is Quark 6.5 on Leopard? On Intel?
• is opening Quakr 6.5 files into Quark 7 still a nightmare (I've been reading horror stories)
• we handle a lot of higher ed math texts, so we're using *XPress Math*
• we're still using Extensis Suitcase v11 because Fusion can't handle the specialized math fonts in our supersets: can Suitcase 11 be run on Leopard?


There are plenty of other things to worry about, I'm sure!

[Joe]

Quark 6.5 will run on an Intel compatible Leopard machine under Rosetta. I think you could possible be facing issues with your existing Quark extensions unless you get Intel specific versions of them. I've got a couple of Photoshop plugins that work under Leopard on a G5 that won't work under Leopard on an Intel Mac. Haven't tried running Quark 6.5 on an Intel Mac to find out for sure though.

[bobd]

Better check it on one machine, and be ready to backgrade. Here's my experience.

In Quark 6.5, step and repeat function is broken... often leads to the dialog box, from which there is no escape but Force Quit.

If you work off a server, you'll have to do "Save As" (or work from desktop).

The script for setting crop marks is broken, possibly others. If you have custom scripts, test 'em.

The Space/Align feature is unreliable; at very least the keyboard shortcut causes unexpected quits.

We have occasional problems with some TrueType fonts not embedding in PDFs. We use Suitcase Fusion and Prinergy. We have to Font Doctor those under Tiger.

I find no mention of Suitcase X1 being supported for Leopard. A post in the Extensis forum indicates X is a no-go.

These issues may not concern you; I don't know enough about your end of the business to advise.

Except it's better to find out what concerns you might have on a dedicated machine, especially if you're in business to make money.

Good luck!

[jimlin]

We ended up convincing the powers that be that we need to keep our G5 towers with OS10.4, thus able to run Classic (legacy files come up from archiving in Quark 4 often enough) and Quark 6.5 in a relatively stable environment.

The new MacBook Pros we are getting will house all the universal apps as well as Windows via Parallels.

The bulk of our product is higher education math titles, and XPress Math was never updated for Quark 7, one of the reasons we're unable to move to Q7. Now with Quark 8 releasing and still no XPress Math update, we up a creek. The other reason we stick with Quark is AutoPage and the company's commitment to a proprietary mark-up language to assist in autopagination, automated math build-ups via XPress Math (used to be Power Math prior to Q6), and thus XML output at the end.

If InMath or Power Math for InDesign can somehow be developed to allow automation via an Autopage-like app for InDesign, we could make the jump... but there doesn't appear to be any long document automation software for InDesign like Autopage for Quark.

Edited by: jimlin on Aug 1, 2008 1:40 PM