QuarkXPress 6 for Mac OS X Ships -- Quark claims it will begin shipping QuarkXPress 6 to customers this week, finally delivering the long-awaited Mac OS X version of the desktop publishing software. The new version adds direct PDF exporting capabilities, improves its Web page creation tools, broadens some output features, and offers full-resolution previews of imported images (though you must register the program with Quark to activate this last feature). QuarkXPress 6 also adds layout spaces to its feature set, a method of sharing style sheets, hyphenation settings, colors, and lists among multiple layouts.

<http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/>

Still, the real news here is that at long last a Mac OS X-native version of QuarkXPress is available. Apple has singled out the lack of QuarkXPress 6 as a reason for low Power Mac sales, reasoning that many publishing professionals are waiting for QuarkXPress before upgrading to new machines that can boot into only Mac OS X. With QuarkXPress 6 finally shipping, it will be interesting to see if Power Mac sales do indeed pick up, or if publishers instead choose to either hang onto old hardware running older versions of QuarkXPress or switch over to Adobe InDesign. QuarkXPress 6 requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later and a minimum of 128 MB of RAM. The software's retail price is $1,045 for a single-user license, but Apple is selling it online for $900; upgrades cost anywhere from $200 to $500, based on your previous version (see Quark's Web site for details). [JLC]

<http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/>
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/ quarkxpress/>
<http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/purchase/>