Upgrading to Quark 7

I was told today that we're upgrading from Quark 4.1 (please hold your snickering) to 7.1 "by the time the snow flies (which given our company's record with technology, means sometime before the third coming of Christ). Any interesting features/shortcuts/tricks you know that I might enjoy?

In related news, we also were told our front-end system is being converted to PC. As my editor ably observed. "Anyone know DOS?"

 

Up: Hope it goes well! We're still stuck at 4.1 here at my shop. Ugh.

 

Had 4.1 until last summer, when we switched to Indesign CS3. Always wanted to try the new Quark, though.

 

No snickering here. I was building pages on 3.1 as recently as late '04.

 

I went from Quark 4.1 to 6 in college. There wasn't much difference, except it was on a Mac, so we updated to OS 10. I'm not as up to speed on the PC version, but basically you're just looking at a few extra bells and whistles.

 

Quark is still in business?

 

Yeah, they were going to send out a memo to everyone using their program saying the company was closing, but their computers kept unexpectedly quitting and they lost it each and every time.

 

Just switched from 4.1 to 7, and I wish I could tell you some new bells and whistles, but it was pretty much dumped in our laps with no communication about updates, differences, etc.

The transparent thing is major notable difference.

And shift-option-command-k while clicked on something still gives you the little alien, which is nice.

 

I'm still running an older version of Quark. Care to explain the transparent thing? Is it a good or bad upgrade and what's it do?

 

I worked with 3.3 at an old shop -- a place where I left ago (and, no, we didn't get an upgrade then).

I'm working on 6.5 now...it's OK, a little better, but not much different than 3.3.

 

I laughed when I saw this because I just bought Quark 7 (personal purchase) to help me out with my magazine freelance gig. Here are some of my initial observations after playing for a few days. You have to forgive me f some of this stuff is old hat for Quark 5 and 6 customers, because I too went from using 4.1 for the past 8 years, straight to Quark 7.

1. Vista sucks!!!!!!!! No, I'm not in the wrong thread, Vista truly does blow. I recieved my copy of Quark and upon putting the installation disk in, got a pop-up that 7.0 can only be installed with Windows XP or 2003. WTF?!? Anyway, after about 20 minutes on the phone with the Quark techy lady, she emailed me the Quark 7.31 installer, and all was well.
2. The transperancy thing is very cool. You would be amazed at how much you can do in quark that you previously had to do in photoshop, save, put into quark, realize your measurements were off, go back into photoshop, move slightly, repeat process over and over again until you get it right. If you want to do a layout with a textured background, and a faded out area to put text so it is readable, Quark 7 is yoru friend. You can do it all there, no photoshop needed.
3. You can actually import unflattened photoshop files and work with them in quark. If you want to add a layer (text, transparency bar) you can do that all in quark so long as you have the extension installed. Don't worry, it seems to come with the program, but is free online if it doesn't.
3. You can also make color corrections in quark with your levels, curves and many, many other photoshop filters, bells and whistles. It's not a matter of opening up something in Photoshop from your quark document, it actually does it in quark.
4. I think this is covered in earleri versions of Quark, post 4.1, but pre 7, but they no longer work in layouts and templates, but projects and project templates. I don't completely have a grasp of it yet, but I think it acts as a cascadign style sheet for you web dudes, in that if you have a project set up with multiple files, and those files all have a like element in them, once you make the change to it once, they all change. It's a time saver. Please, all those more familiar than me, correct me if my knowlege of projects is lacking.
5. PDF's. You can export your files as PDFs pretty seemlessly, just as in in design, and you can do this in any number of ways. You can just export a PDF, or you can install a print driver as a PDF (as I used to do in Quark 4). If you have a freelance gig, PDF's are the way to go with most every job you get, and Quark does this easily now.
6. Seemless transition. My biggest fear with Quark 7 was that I was going to have to learn something completely new, but I found myself designing right off the bat because everything from the design standpoint was identical to quark 4.1. The only difference was all the bells and whistles thrown in. All the quick keys seem to be the same, making for an easy transition. Is InDesign hard to learn, probably not, based on what I hear, but like I said, I'm a quark guy.

That's pretty much it, off the top of my head. I plan on playing a lot more with it over the next week (I have a bit of downtime in my three-month magazine cycle) Personally, I have In Design CS2 on my computer, but chose to shell out the 300 bucks for the educational student edition instead of learnign indesign, mostly because I'm a quark guy. I think you will enjoy this upgrade.