SAN FRANCISCO (Macworld) - January 9, 2007 - Customers ask, and Quark delivers. Quark Inc. announced today the release of QuarkXPress 7.1, the new Universal upgrade to the award-winning desktop design software. The latest upgrade answers customers’ needs with performance enhancements, making the design software more responsive. “We have been working with our customers to identify their needs and are confident that users will find this application even more responsive,” said Richard Pasewark, Quark senior vice president of sales (Americas). “This release is our response to customer needs and market feedback. Quark is committed to providing our customers with the best design and production software to make them more successful.” Listening to market needs, Quark made significant performance improvements in several key areas — including text selection, clipped images, and flattening features. Each feature has received a performance boost, resulting in faster production times. In addition, the Universal upgrade has provided performance improvements throughout the application, and in some areas QuarkXPress 7.1 is up to five times faster on Intel-based Macs than PowerPC*. "QuarkXPress 7 was one of the first major publishing applications to run as a Universal application and take advantage of our blazing fast Intel-based Macs," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “We're thrilled that Quark has upgraded its flagship desktop design software to improve performance even more on Intel-based machines.” QuarkXPress 7 has already proved to offer a vastly higher ROI than in previous versions of QuarkXPress in a study published by the Seybold Report. Based on best practices suggested by users within both design-intensive and production-intensive environments, the report found that new collaboration features contributed heavily to the ability of QuarkXPress 7 to complete workflow in the fastest time. QuarkXPress 7 also produced the most reliable PDF output through the use of the Quark Job Jackets technology. Jürgen Kurz, Quark senior vice president of desktop products, commented: “While we continue to innovate with new products such as Quark Interactive Designer and Quark Print Collection, QuarkXPress 7.1 demonstrates our commitment to improving performance and reliability”