Experts at Screen and Agfa have reported that Quark's historical bugbear, PDF generation, has not been solved in the new version, while Fuji has reported trouble with EPS output.

The news comes despite recently announced high-profile upgrades at publishers Time Out and Metro Inter-national.

The main complaint is over the exporting of PDF files, a feature introduced in Quark-XPress 5 that has repeatedly caused problems. Workflow suppliers are currently preparing updates to their own software in order to correct issues that have been encountered with Quark PDFs.

Screen technical manager Sean Warner said: "In its own admission, [Quark] has had problems with PDF generation. Version 7 was supposed to address that and although it has improved, it still does not work."

Agfa UK technical manager Victor Runacre said he was advising customers to leave the PDF generation to the workflow. Fuji workflow manager Andy Walker said EPS file output, rather than PDF output, had been causing problems.

Quark insisted it had solv-ed the PDF generation issues. European marketing manager Gavin Drake said: "It's now outputting certified PDFs, so it should be coming out error free."

Drake said version 7.02 would resolve some PDF-related issues that had been  reported by users, including the shifting of text and images during the creation of PDFs.

He added that in beta-testing, the feedback on PDF export features was "especially positive" and several large firms were using it.

Quarkxpress 7
May 2006 Launches worldwide
June 2006 Quark announces partnership with GretagMacbeth
August 2006 Release of 7.01 version for Mac OS X 10.4
September 2006 Adopted by Metro International
October 2006 Adopted by Time Out, QuarkXPress 7.02 released


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