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| Quark 6.5 Update Fixes Some Font Problems | | Date Created: 13 Nov, 2004, 05:07 PM |
 At the beginning of this month (November 2004) Quark, Inc. released the free 6.5 update for owners of QuarkXPress or QuarkXPress Passport 6.x. This much anticipated release addressed a number of issues in previous versions of Quark. For a complete list of all the problems that this update resolved, you can visit the QuarkXPress 6.5 Issues Resolved page.
Since this is Font Geek, I'd like to look at the font related improvements or changes in the update. |
 According to Quark... Expand your Linotype library: For a limited time, registered QuarkXPress 6.5 users gain access to a font package with more than 40 OpenType fonts from Linotype. And if you are prompted with a "Missing font" message, you can click the "Buy missing font" button and buy additional fonts from Linotype at a special price for registered users.
The only thing I didn't like about this is that I couldn't find the offer from within any of the menus in Quark. (If it's in one of the menus, I couldn't find it.) But I do like that Quark is encouraging it's users to move toward OpenType as the font format. |
 According to Quark... If you imported an EPS file into a picture box with no font embedded, and the font is not available on the system, saving the layout as an EPS file still displayed the font as embedded in the EPS file. This issue has been resolved.
I have not had many people complain about this one to me -- so I don't know if there are a lot of people who have had problems with this particular problem. (In other words, I didn't know that this was broken.) But I like that they fixed it.
According to Quark... Mac OS 10.3.5 only: If you tried to print text from a layout using ITC Zapf Dingbats font, QuarkXPress displayed a PostScript alert. This issue has been resolved. |
 This is a decent fix. Although it does not address problems with font corruption alerts (or false font corruption alerts) from fonts that may be OK but that Quark doesn't seem to like. To Quark's credit they include the FontAlertSilencer.xnt in the Extras folder within the QuarkXPress 6.5 Updater folder. If you are interested in more information about the FontAlertSilencer Xtension or the reason why you would use it, you can read more about this in the Quark - Silencing the Font Alert article in the Application Issues section of Font Geek
Note: This is not the same problem also reported by Quark users about Zapf Dingbat fonts that would not show up in Quark 6.x documents. That is not a QuarkXPress problem. It was a Mac OS 10.3.5 problem that can be resolved by updating your Mac OS to version 10.3.6. You can read more about this in the Mac OS 10.3.6 Update Fixes 10.3.5 Font Issues article in the OS X issues section of Font Geek.
According to Quark... Mac OS 10.3.3 only: If you created a project with specific Czech characters using Helvetica CE, Geneva CE 9 or 10 point size and printed it to any PostScript printer, the spacing between the 9 and 10 point characters appeared different from other point sizes. Also, when printed, negative kerning was applied for all capital characters along with positive kerning for lowercase characters. These issues have been resolved.
I tested this out with Helvetica CE and Geneva CE. The results on my postscript printer would indicate that this problem has been resolved. |
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| Despite the bad press and reaction in the forums (that any activity made by Quark, Inc. seems to generate), this was a good update. If we look at just this upgrade, Quark, Inc. released a fairly comprehensive update and they did it for free. You can say what you want about the main product itself (and I could say plenty), but I think this upgrade is very decent. I hope Quark, Inc. keeps this trend up. |
 I'm not going to give this update a rating. Although I think that this update deserve a fairly good rating, any rating I give it will be taken as a rating for the overall QuarkXPress 6.5 product itself -- which as a piece of commercial software does not deserve as high a rating as the free update (IMHO).
Follow-up on the QuarkXPress printing problem issue...
After the update was released I received complaints that some fonts that didn't print in QuarkXPress 6.1 still did not print in QuarkXPress 6.5. After more testing and analysis of the problem I discovered that most of the problems reported had to do with font permissions (which also seems to apply to some other applications as well). You can read more about this font permission problem as well as how to address it in the Quark - some documents don't print in Quark 6.1 article in the Application Issues section of Font Geek. |
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