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, Inc. announced that it continues to conquer the desktop in educational institutions across North America and Europe. Among the schools declaring adoption of QuarkXPress 8 are John Abbott College in Quebec, Merivale High School in Ottawa, Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology in Ontario, and Nativity School Catholic Elementary in Hollywood, Florida. European institutions Swansea Metropolitan University, UK, Akademie der Bildenden Künste (ABK) in Stuttgart, Germany, Graphische Wien, Austria, and Schule für Gestaltung St. Gallen, Switzerland, and others have also made the switch.

Local governments in France are also reportedly fans of QuarkXPress.

Coinciding with the announcements Quark declared a renewed committment to getting them young by launching a new U.S. K-12 school volume licensing program. The program offers 250 seats of QuarkXPress 8 for an astounding price of less than $6 USD per seat and 500 seat packs for under $5 per seat. Find full details of the program here.

If you aren’t in the US and or don’t need 500 licenses for $2,500 USD, here’s another deal you might like. Enfocus, Quark, and my friends at XChangeUK.com have teamed up to offer a free copy of Enfocus Instant PDF (a £285.00 value) to QuarkXPress users in the UK and Ireland who upgrade to XPress 8 via XChangeUK.com. The £259.00 upgrade price for QuarkXPress is actually less than the cost of Instant PDF alone! This is a limited time offer which will expire at midnight GMT 30 June, 2009. Don’t delay!

Single copies of QuarkXPress 8 can be purchased by students at accredited private or public schools (K-12 through college) for only $168 USD per copy. That’s not $5 a copy, but it’s still a heck of a lot better than the $799.00 we graduates pay!

The third edition of Color Essentials: Color and Quality for the Graphic Arts and Sciences by Gary G. Field (Gatfpress, 2009) published this month. The three-volume reference covers color correction, color specifications, how to judge color quality, and more.

Interviews this month included Jay Nelson (of Planet Quark and Design Tools Monthly) talking QuarkXPress an conferences on on MacVoices and, on Inside Digital Design Radio, me, Pariah S. Burke, discussing QuarkXPress versus InDesign, Quark Publishing System, and Twitter for creative professionals.

QuarkXPress Cheatsheets from Noble Desktop

Tutorials

Download free QuarkXPress 7 and 8 keyboard shortcut cheatsheets from NYC-based trainer, Noble Desktop.

Jay Nelson shows off two slick and valuable uses for XPress 7’s Export > Layout as Project to save backward beyond just the last version of QuarkXPress and to extract single layouts from a project.

“Stop Text from Jumping When Wrapping.”

Get control of your output costs by examining the plates that will output from each layer.

Hidden the Welcome Screen and want it back? Here’s how.

Quark posted to its site new video tutorials that help you draw custom shapes with the Bezier pen tool and output Flash from QuarkXPress 8.

Create better colored background text boxes using insets.

Double-click any part of a URL in QuarkXPress 8.02 or later to automatically select the entire URL.

“Drag-Select Entire Paragraphs,” a tip by Jay Nelson.

You can also get “Better EPS Previews.”

Use V and T in QuarkXPress 8 to switch to the Item and Text tools, respectively. There’s a little more detail here on PlanetQuark.com.

Use wildcards to expand Find/Change search and replace operations or “Find First and Find Next.”

Speaking of searching, Line Check can find widows, orphans, and overflows!

Reset Rulers’ Zero Point.

Make the Preview button in dialog boxes sticky.

Products

MarkzWare this month updated its famous MarkzTools for QuarkXPress 8, 7, 6, 5, and 4, and produced a video showing you how to use Markztools 8 for QuarkXPress!

Badia released PrintPreview, a free xtension that places a live print preview inside the Print dialog. Badia also updated ContactPage 2 to version 2.1, which, while swell in QuarkXPress 7, sadly still doesn’t support QuarkXPress 8.

Vision’s Edge, however, is more on the ball (sort of), with several product updates this month. Art Gallery XT ($49 USD), VTools ($59), BarCoder XT ($99), and Fraemz PS XT ($99) all now work with XPress 8 on OSX–there is no version available for Windows. Even the $99 IndeXTension, also updated this month to XPress 8 for OSX compatibility, snubs Windows-based QuarkXPress users. It works up to XPress 7 on Windows. does do XPress 8, but only on OS X.

Apparently no one told Vision’s Edge that, due largely to Quark’s ambition to become the enterprise publishing provider, the number of Windows desktops running QuarkXPress is quickly eclipsing the number of installations on Mac desktops.

Badia is also guilty of ignoring Windows QuarkXPress users–it’s new update to FullMeasure also doesn’t do Windows.

Managing Editor updated the Split & Folio and Find File Links (aka FiFi XT) xtensions with QuarkXPress 8 compatibility.