Quark Forums

I am afraid I would agree with your Boss. If what you have is doing the job then its not worth upgrading. We had to upgrade as we are a pre press dept. and we have to keep up with what files the customers send in.
As the old saying goes 'If it aint broke then don't fix it'

What extras do you think that the newer versions have over the older ones. Quark 6 can't import a pdf file that is above 1.3.

Down tool. No only joking.

As well as being more creative and flexible with newer versions, there is the cost implication. Say you don't update and eventually it will be so old that, when you do have to update for output reason, it will cost a lot more or in some cases a complete full version.

Unfortunatly this is not an uncommon dilema. Quark 4 does indeed work fine for many in the industry but it was never intended to be a proper venue for PDFs.

Just cause someone wrote an extension to add some for of functionality does not mean it is fully functional.

If your boss has deemed it appropriate to stick with a working system, you are kinda stuck with it too. You are not alone, though.

However, your boss is also straddling you with the limitations of that system and can't complain. Accepting PDF ads without the software to verify or fix/troubleshoot them is ill-advised.

From what you say it seems that you are at the creative end rather than the finishing end so InDesign would be the better upgrade as it integrates well with the other Adobe products.
How we get round the pdf problem is to use Acrobat 6 to save the page as an eps and bring that into a page or a ps file and redistill it.

Are you using 4 or 4.11?
We never had a problem with 4.11 on a mac and used the pdf filter regularly.

No, you cannot save Quark 6 files back to 4.11 ... you can backsave to 5, and then use Quark 5 to backsave to 4.

If you are having these problems then your Boss can't complain as he is not upgrading his system to cope with Postscript Level 3 language. He either accepts that things will go wrong or he upgrades. Indesign seems the better at more complicated things like transparency but it depends on the output rip wich decides what can be done.