QuarkXPress 8, 9 and Lion

Bug39 Comments

A lot of people have been asking me recently whether it’s safe to use QuarkXPress 8 or 9 with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). The short answer is: it depends. (Are you feeling lucky?)

For whatever reason, some people are having complete success, and others are having a hard time. I ran into a conversation on Apple’s online discussion board that illustrates this.

You can read the conversation here, but for now the conversation goes like this:

Question: Anybody running Quark 8 or 9 under lion?

Answer from Quark representative: 

As you might know, Quark doesn’t yet officially support QuarkXPress under Lion:

http://forums.quark.com/t/21811.aspx

That said, to our current knowledge we do not know of any major issues of QuarkXPress 8 or 9 under Lion. Also user wikis report both versions to run under Lion. Still, as this is anecdotal, you should do your own tests before running QuarkXPress under Lion.

Quark is currently testing the final build of Lion with QuarkXPress 9 and will release a free update to QuarkXPress 9, called 9.1, in August. QuarkXPress 9.1 will be officially supported on Lion.

This was followed by comment by another user:

I’m currently using Quark 8.51 with Lion an been working on a major project. Perhaps thirty-five hours of layout under Lion. So far so good. No problems to report.

I did get a couple of crashes when I initially launched Quark but Lion was still updating it’s indexes and doing it’s thing — so I’m guessing that was it. Smooth sailing so far.

And another followup comment by a different user:

I had my laptop in for repair and use it to build a weekly newspaper.  I had to rush to buy a back up because it wasn’t going to be back to me in time for the next build.  The back up had Lion on it.  I had no choice but to use Quark with it because that’s all I had. I initially crashed over and over, then after trashing prefs it seemed to work itself out long enough for me to build.  Well, now that I’m done and ready to go in for the next project, it won’t open at all now.  Just crash after crash.  Tech support gives me the same canned response that Quark 9 doesn’t support Lion but it will in late August.  ARGH!!!!  Good thing my laptop came home, finally!

The first user followed up with this:

Just an update: I’m a publisher and have now completed to entire magazines using Quark 8.5.1 and Lion with no issues. I use Font Explorer to automatically activate/turn off fonts as neded but not sure that has anything to do with it. Anyway I’m really happy with stability of Quark 8 under Lion. Keeping my fingers crossed none of the upcoming Lion updates breaks that.

And then the second user followed up with this:

I have been able to build, but I have to trash prefs every time I open the program up. That’s basically every day.

I am not finding it stable at all. If I move the mouse a little too much or do something too fast, it crashes. Thank goodness for the recovery file!

So… as I said before, are you feeling lucky?

(If you’re using Lion with QuarkXPress, PLEASE comment below on your experience!!)