Apple released new MacBooks and MacBook Pros recently, and today I received a question about whether it was safe to use QuarkXPress 6.52 with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
The answer is: QuarkXPress 6.52 and earlier will NOT work 100% properly with Leopard (nor does Adobe Creative Suite 2, which is of the same vintage). And unfortunately, since no recent Macs can run on earlier operating systems, you’ll need to either upgrade QuarkXPress or find a used Mac that can run 10.4 or 10.3. (I’d strongly encourage upgrading QuarkXPress!)
You see, Mac OS X 10.5 was nowhere on the horizon when Quark shipped QuarkXPress 6. In fact Mac OS X 10.3 was current when QuarkXPress 6 was released, almost two full years before Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, which was the predecessor to 10.5. Apple changed a LOT of basic-level things from 10.3 to 10.4, and then again in 10.5.
Since I couldn’t find a one-stop source that listed the problems you’re likely to encounter when trying to use QuarkXPress 6.5 in Mac OS X 10.5, I thought I’d try to collect as many broken bits as I could find.
Picking through Quark’s user forums, here are the problems I found so far:
- File corruption, especially when opened across a network.
- Unexpected quits when saving a file.
- “Unexpected end-of-file occurred. [-39]” errors.
- Font confusion in existing documents, especially Zapf Dingbats.
- Fonts don’t print correctly, defaulting to Courier.
- Loss of some printing capabilities.
- Loss of printer PPD file location.
- Loss of PDF generation.
- Not everything shows up in menu items, dialog box components, or palettes.
- Can’t input values for new Section.
- Can’t input values when adding pages.
- Can’t input values for Step and Repeat.
- If you hide the application, it sometimes won’t come back — you have to force quit it.
As you can see, it isn’t pretty. You may not run into all of these problems, but even one or two would be a showstopper for me.
And before you ask: QuarkXPress 7.5 works relatively well in Leopard, except for the window hiding issues and the PPD file location issue noted above. For a solution to the PPD problem, see here.
If anyone has additional problems running QuarkXPress 6.5 in Leopard, we’d love to hear about them — just use the comments feature below. (But please, keep it to version 6.5 AND Mac OS X 10.5!)
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19. January 2009 at 3:59 am
we also have the xpressmath problem in quark xpress 6.5 with mac 10.5.5
19. January 2009 at 1:40 pm
Aha. That makes some sense — Apple changed its font handling routines quite a lot in the years since QuarkXPress 6.5 was released, and I imagine that XPressmath works with fonts fairly heavily. But that’s just a guess.
Thanks for your input, Bhaskar.
17. February 2009 at 10:22 am
Am having problems also with Quark 6.5 on OS 10.5, if I try to duplicate a text box on a master page it quits; the insertion of pages makes it quit and sometimes a tool wont complete it’s action and I have to force quit.
Can you suggest any solution other than upgrading – I’ve only just bought it!
18. February 2009 at 3:34 pm
Annette: it sounds like a great opportunity to try out Quark’s vastly improved (and free!) technical support system. Give them a call. I’ll bet they can sort out the problem for you in no time.
But also: as I mentioned in my story, Quark 6.5 doesn’t mix all that well with Mac OS X 10.5. There’s just too big a time difference between when they were written.
15. April 2009 at 10:33 am
I’m having an issue with Quark 6.5 in Leopard – if I double click on a file to open it in Quark, it generates an automatic copy of the file in my folder. Is there a way to get this to stop? The only way to NOT generate an automatic copy is to drag the file out of the folder onto the Quark icon in the dock, and that’s just awkward to do every single time I want to open a file. I just want to double click on it like I used to do in Tiger.
Thanks!
15. April 2009 at 3:22 pm
Barb: I seem to recall a problem like this, but don’t recall the solution. A quick call to Quark would get you the answer, though. It’s free. (You can also get live help at their website for free.)
28. April 2009 at 1:26 pm
I contacted Quark regarding many of these problems. Their answer: “We only provide support for Quark 7 and 8.”
28. April 2009 at 5:20 pm
Ah, yes. They stopped providing free support for version 6 at the end of March. I forgot about that. How about using the free Forums at Quark’s website?
14. May 2009 at 8:28 am
…want to upgrade to OS X 10.5. I’m generally working with InDesign for years now, using QuarkXpress Passport (version 6.5) only to open or change old documents made in Quark. Do I have to upgrade Quark to be able to open old XPress documents or is there a workaround to still open them in OS X 10.5 without having to upgrade Quark? If not, can I run OS X 10.4.11 on an external disk or on a partition on my laptop, and if yes, how would I do that?
TX!!
Raphael
14. May 2009 at 1:43 pm
Raphael: I don’t think you’ll have any trouble opening older QuarkXPress documents. I wouldn’t use 6.5 for production (much) in Mac OS X 10.5, but opening and making changes shouldn’t cause too much trouble for you.
4. June 2009 at 4:20 pm
has anyone heard of a issue where the text is styled but quark 6.5 doesnt display the correct style sheet in the style panel when you highlight text?( or doesnt save the styling)
5. June 2009 at 6:18 am
When saving pages to eps and you want to fill in which page, at the same time the textfield for the filename will be filled in. Changing the filename activates again also the page order textfield! Filling in the amount of bleed results in double decimal characters (33) in stead of the one you typed. Copy and paste of the decimal however works!
5. June 2009 at 9:36 am
Hey, great workaround! Thanks for sharing it. Are we having fun yet? ;-)
22. June 2009 at 5:51 pm
• Tiger and Quark 6.5 is far from flawless. We have both Tigers and Leopards, and Tiger is not that much better. The big difference with Leopard is when saving files (and opening them) over a network – mac or windows. When you then save a Q6.5 file in Leopard you get a template file, through the template function that has been in mac OS since decades. A big mystery why, but that what’s happens. You can see it if you choose ”Get info” on the Q file. Quark here in Sweden didn’t know about this. The only solution for us is to ALWAYS do a ”Save as…” instead of a ordinary ”Save”, thus overwriting the original file. Not a good solution, but it works. We can’t drag the Quark files to the icon in the dock because we use an editorial system which opens the Quark files through a web browser.
• Moving over to Quark 7 has it’s problems too. When you open a Quark 6.5 file in Q7 some of the text changes. Q7 has changed how it handles fonts. So making a new document from a Q6.5 template is fine, but if you want to use an old Q6.5 file you got trouble.
• The printing problem of loss of printer PPD file location is easy to remedy, you find them by browsing in the Quarks ”PPD Manager” to ”/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources”.
24. July 2009 at 2:40 pm
Save the Quark Page as an eps file. Then open through Illustrator and you will then be able to create a PDF file in Illustrator.
11. August 2009 at 8:19 am
This is crazy, but I am still running Panther. And it works fine, so I’d leave it as is. Except I bought a new iPhone, which is incompatible. So, I am considering upgrading to Tiger and have concerns about my Quark 6.5. It sounds as though I should be okay, is that correct? I do not have an intel processor.
12. August 2009 at 8:47 am
Katrina: you should be fine with Tiger and QuarkXPress 6.5. But note Erik Nilsson’s post above. There ARE some glitches. The best combination right now is Quark 8 and Leopard.
12. August 2009 at 8:47 am
Katrina: I should have mentioned: QuarkXPress 7 and 8 run fastest on an Intel Mac.
3. September 2009 at 2:31 pm
is it possible to save a quark 8.0 file down to a quark 6.5 version?
8. September 2009 at 5:11 pm
Our reason for not going from 6.5 to 7 is that our heavily used Baseview product NewsEdit Pro is not compatible with 7 or newer. They are being stubborn. If they would be compatible, then I am willing to upgrade
14. September 2009 at 10:25 pm
N. PADILLA,
To get a v6.5 file from v8, you’d have to have QuarkXPress v7, too. Current versions of QuarkXPress will only downsave one version back.
My department is just now updating to v8 from v7 and it hasn’t been pretty, either. QuarkXPress will not update the on-screen preview of a modified PDF. The only way I can get Quark to update the preview is to change the name of the PDF file and re-import. And, no, just deleting the box and re-importing doesn’t work.
I long for the simpler days…
regards,
MAJ
17. September 2009 at 1:36 pm
I see where you have a couple “Save Page as EPS” items. Here’s my two cents. The focus is on both the “Save As:” and “Page” fields. The result is both fields simultaneously accept typed input. Not what you really want.
Tabbing out or clicking on anything to change the input focus will de-couple the typed input so that only one field accepts type.
The insertion point and the input area don’t match. Tabbing on mine will bring up a focus area that doesn’t match the insertion point. Mousing around from field to field doesn’t work. You have to use keyboard command period to cancel or keyboard enter key to Ok the dialogue boxes.
After looking over your blog and seeing the Step and Repeat and Insert Page issues, I tried them out too.
This is too flaky for any real use. I’m going back to 10.4.x for Quark 6.5.2
This is on a G5, OSs 10.5.6 and 10.5.7 and Quirk 6.5.2.
25. September 2009 at 9:48 pm
Here’s a real bad one for me. In Leopard (and now Snow Leopard), if I try to use the space/align dialogue and call it up by pressing XPress crashes almost every time. It doesn’t crash as often if I call it up from the pulldown menus, but I like to work faster with keyboard commands. Imagine my chagrin…I’ve lost a lot of work over the last couple of months and have resorted to extremely paranoid work habits, like saving every 2 minutes or every time after typing in a sentence or two. Inevitably, XPress 6.52 will crash. It’s just not stable in Leopard. If you are committed to using XPress, do yourself a favor and upgrade. I have phased out XPress over the last couple of years because all of my clients have switched to InDesign. There a just a few XPress users left…it’s not really worth it to me to invest in an upgrade…
26. September 2009 at 5:43 am
The problem with Leopard and Quark 6.5 and saving Quarkfiles on a server, that I have reported on earlier, seems to have been solved with Snow Leopard. Works fine for me now, so I’m happy. But we still have a lot of G5s, so I not wholeheartedly happy.
11. December 2009 at 2:41 pm
I have a most-infuriating problem with Quark 6.5 since upgrading to OS 10.5.6 – I can no longer open more than one Quark doc at a time. Attempting to open a second Quark page crashes the program.
31. January 2010 at 7:33 am
LBC Dec 11: I have the opposite experience. We have Quark 6.52 and the documents on both PC and Mac servers. With Tiger we can only open one file at a time, we get a warning that the file is already open if we try to open many files. But with Leopard we can open many files at a time.
If we have the files locally we can open many files at a time with both Tiger and Leopard.