Planet Quark

Each time a new version of QuarkXPress is released, I receive a bunch of questions about how to save a QuarkXPress document so that it may be read by a previous version of QuarkXPress.

With the recent release of QuarkXPress 9, this question is high in the minds of many. As with all versions of QuarkXPress, you can save your documents down by one version. So, QuarkXPress 9 can save down to version 8. QuarkXPress 8 can save down to version 7, and so on.

Here’s a description of how to save down to a previous version in any recent version of QuarkXPress:

From the File menu, choose Export Layouts as Project…

If you have more than one Layout in your Project, select the one or more you wish to include in your new Project.

(Note: there appears to be a bug in version 9.0 that causes the names of the Layouts to be blank. I assume Quark will fix this in an update to the program.)

From the Version popup menu, select the version you want the Project to be saved as.

That’s it! A copy of your project will now be saved (exported) in a format that the previous version of QuarkXPress can open and use.

Just remember that any features you used that were new to QuarkXPress 9 may not be saved with this copy of your document. In QuarkXPress 9, that would include the e-book features. Also, while features such as ShapeMaker and Bullets & Numbering are new, the items they create are standard QuarkXPress items that will be recognized by previous versions. However, if you want to edit them, you’ll have to edit them manually since these item-creation features aren’t available in previous versions of QuarkXPress.

There’s one more feature in the Export Layouts as Projects dialog that you may be interested in. If you happen to want to save your Project as a Template instead of as a Project (for example, to use it in the future without risk of changing this file), choose Template from the Type popup menu.

Here’s a bonus tip:

If you’re curious about which version of QuarkXPress was used to create the original version of a document, read here.

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