Missed a story or two of Gurus Unleashed’s 24/7 coverage? Catch up with these important events and stories that happened in the world of QuarkXPress.

News

Quark announced first a $299 upgrade special from version 3, 4, or 5 to version 8, then two weeks later, a $199 upgrade deal. The new(er) deal, announced 27 March and valid only through 30 April 2009, enables a $199 upgrade to QuarkXPress for any copy of XPress 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 registered and used in the Americas. Even sweeter, taking advantage of the $199 upgrade gets you not only QuarkXPress 8 but also QuarkXPress 9 (when it’s released), a 2-year ServicePlus membership, two-day, on-site GAP or transitional training, technical support by Quark’s Level 2 and 3 technicians, and a 25% discount on all Quark branded XPress XTensions!

Orders must be processed by 30 April 2009, and must use the promotional code 0430QXPPROMO. Call (800-998-1716) or e-mail ([email protected]) Quark ServicePlus to order.

Taking an aboutface, perhaps you’re considering a migration from QuarkXPress. If so, check out the free QuarkXPress to InDesign CS4 Conversion Guide released in March. To go the other way, move to QuarkXPress from InDesign, check out this video tutorial on using Markzware’s ID2Q.

Ver.di Publik, one of the largest independent individual trade unions in the world, adopted Quark Publishing System 8 to procude their printed and Web materials for its 2.3 million members across more than 1,000 different trades and professions.

How-To

Easily create data combs for printed forms.

Tips and tricks for working with the Guides Manager.

Still unsure about color management in XPress? Jay Nelson and Lynda.com present a nice three-minute video primer in “Automatic Color Management in QuarkXPress 7 and 8“.

Link an Excel xpreadsheet to a table.

Space the Dots in Dotted Leaders

Learn to use one of my favorite features of QuarkXPress 7 and 8, sychronized items, in this video tutorial from Lynda.com and Jay Nelson

“Video Tutorial: The Amazing (and overlooked) Glyphs Palette!” by Jay Nelson.

Name PDFs created from XPress better–automatically.

Products

Vision’s Edge releases Acronyms, a free XTension for QuarkXPress 6, 7, and 8 (Mac only). It’s function is simple: Acronyms replaces uppercase acronyms or initials throughout your layout with small caps. To control the size of small caps, check out this Planet Quark tutorial from last year.

Moniker 8, another Mac-only free XTension from Vision’s Edge, facilitates scripting of QuarkXPress by enabling you to add AppleScript names to objects in QuarkXPress.

Gluon updates its popular DocuSlim EV XTension to work with QuarkXPress 6, 7, and 8. DocuSlim fixes incorrect image resolution, color space, and other common imported image problems by re-processing images in Photoshop and then re-importing them to XPress. The new version is US$399.

Slugger, another Gluon XTension, also updated this month.