NEW YORK—In a show of solidarity with Mac-based publishing, Quark Inc. delivered a feature presentation at Macworld CreativePro here last week.

Presented by Jürgen Kurz, vice president of product management, it was the Denver-based company's first public display to Mac users since shipping QuarkXPress 6 for Mac OS X and Windows last month—and a rare trade-show appearance for a company that has frequently eschewed Macworld Expo gatherings.

During his presentation, Kurz sought to reassure professional content creators that Denver-based Quark still sees its traditional Mac market as core to its business, despite its increasing efforts to push its software for Windows. He also pledged to speed up development of future developments of the page-layout program.

"It's always been an interesting relationship with the Mac community ... sometimes a bit rocky," Kurz said, apparently referring to Mac users' concerns about lengthy delays to the Mac OS X-native version of XPress. However, he told the crowd that Quark was here to "celebrate" that the new version was shipping. "Quark is dedicated to Apple," Kurz said, "and nowhere is that more evident than QuarkXPress 6."

Kutz outlined the feature set of QuarkXPress 6, touting its support for open standards such as XML, HTML, and Adobe Systems Inc.'s PostScript and Portable Document Format. He also discussed the product's cross-media publishing tools and ease of use. "You can print, and output, what you can imagine," Kurz told attendees.

On stage, Kurz demonstrated the product's new features, including projects, synchronized text, multiple undos, Web enhancements, and improvements to PDF workflow. He also said that XPress 6 was written as a Mach-O Carbon application and can take advantage of Mac OS X technologies such as AppleScript. "Everything is there" for users who want to make the jump from previous XPress releases to Mac OS X, Kurz said.

Kurz was joined by Peter McClard, president of Gluon Inc., who discussed process of porting his company's XTensions (XPress-compatible software plug-ins) to Mac OS X.

McClard said there had been concern that the switch to Mac OS X and XPress 6 would cause XTension code to "come flying apart," and noted that considerations indeed had to be made for the OS switch. However, McClard told attendees that Quark is taking the transition seriously, and "did a great job of making our job smooth." Kurz said that more than 500 commercial XTensions are available to users, and that Quark is working to ensure that the most important plug-ins get ported.

Kurz also discussed the Quark Publishing System, which he said is used by 900 customers and 50,000 users worldwide. Because companies can't move to Mac OS X without all parts of the Quark Publishing System working on the new OS, all components will run on Mac OS X by the first quarter of 2004, Kurz told attendees. He also outlined Quark's other products, such as the Quark Content Manager and the Quark Dynamic Document Server, the latter of which Kurz said Quark plans to launch soon.

Kurz closed his presentation by acknowledging the pressure that Quark was under from Apple and Mac users to ship XPress 6 for Mac OS X. "It's been tough for us," he said, but announced that copies of the new version are shipping to customers. "We just got totally bombarded with orders," Kurz told attendees, and said that the company had a "huge backload."

Kurz pledged that the next major upgrade won't prompt the same impatience. Eyeing the next version, Kurz said, "I can assure you that we're going to come out with a major revision every 14 to 18 months."