# Quark 8 & Snow leopard = CRAP



## andreww (Nov 20, 2002)

Before I draw your wrath, be clear that our company is several years in to converting to Indesign, but we do have years worth of Quark docs that we are still converting.

So decided that it was about time to give Snow Leopard a good test in our work environment. I've been using it for a year on my MBP without issue, and I'd tested all printers before taking the plunge. Long story short, every quark file on our Windows 2003 server has become a Unix Executable file. I have to do the "open with" thang for every file. Much worse, when the file is opened, every eps import is a gray box, and those files need to be opened and resaved!

GRRRRRR!


----------



## ChilBear (Mar 20, 2005)

Just add the Quark extension and you should be good to go. A far better way to port is, if you still have them. open Quark and save backward 8 to 7, 7 to 6, 6 to5 then 5 to 4 and INDD will open up V4 files "nicely". I have kept my G4 with OS 9 just for this and it has saved my bacon.

SL is very nice and Quark well enough said. They are getting what they sowed, in very bad customer service.


----------



## andreww (Nov 20, 2002)

You should use q2id, works amazingly.


----------



## wonderings (Jun 10, 2003)

Had no issues with Quark in SL, but its now an app collecting dust. We do have a lot of files done in Quark, as that used to be the big gun, but now anything new is all done with indesign, and we slowly as have need, update Quark files to Indesign. I had a few Quark files lose the extension, but for the most part they all transferred fine with no need to update links or anything like that. Were all the jobs packaged properly?


----------



## andreww (Nov 20, 2002)

Yep, all jobs are package properly. Everything works fine on Leopard, but I've got three machines all experiencing the same issues. 

- Quark files appear as unix files on the windoze 2003 servers and maintain that appearance when copied back to the mac

- Files must be forced to open as quark files (option to apply to all does not work)

- Quark is only recognizing a handful of fonts, even though they are in ~/library/fonts.

- Suitcase seems to be conflicting, I had to completely disable in order to open several quark files today.

- Illustrator EPS files are sometimes showing as a grey box with no preview available.

Other issues

-Entourage keeps crashing

-magic mouse works like crap in indesign

-This is becoming a real nightmare!


Can I archive and install my way back to Leopard or do I need to start from scratch? Man, I miss the days when Apple valued the creative pros. I think they are far too interested in phones and mp3 players these days and don't give a crap about things like font management or software compatibility.


----------



## Dammacx (May 22, 2006)

Yeah my boss won't give up his Quark and it runs really slow on Regular Snow Leopard on a older G5 Mac. It seems to have serious issues printing placed vector files. Have tried a few simple test and trying to rip a simple file with a very simple placed vector file takes for ever compared to inDesign. I use to love Quark back in the day but you just can't beat the tight integration of CS.

I never use quark these days unless it is to open a legacy file and then if I can get away with it I will just rebuild it in InDesign.


----------



## Guest (Nov 4, 2010)

andreww said:


> Yep, all jobs are package properly. Everything works fine on Leopard, but I've got three machines all experiencing the same issues.
> 
> - Quark files appear as unix files on the windoze 2003 servers and maintain that appearance when copied back to the mac
> 
> ...



I would suspect a lot of this is a result of your Windows 2003 file server. Sounds like it's eating resource forks (if the files show up as "unix" files that's exactly what's happened to them). This will mangle Quark files, fonts and EPS files to varying degrees of usability.

If there are similar problems with some of the fonts that would also account for the Suitcase issues (it barfs pretty badly on damaged fonts), the missing fonts that are in your fonts folder and entourage crashes (likely a damaged/conflicted font -- check the helvetica family).

Also missing res forks would account for EPS with no previews (many apps store the preview in the res fork).

Are you connecting to it via afp or smb? Also how is everyone else connecting to it? If you're mixing and matching afp and smb this can be problematic too. The windows implementation of HFS is horribly bad (based on the days before afp over tcp/ip). Snow Leopard should handle connecting via SMB seamlessly and not lose resource forks (in theory, depending on the patch/hotfix level of your 2003 server). I'd suggest pushing everyone down that route if it's possible ... but if you're in a mixed environment it might not be. Pre Leopard users for example shouldn't do this.


----------



## ChilBear (Mar 20, 2005)

Here is a prepress forum I also belong to and there are solutions on all kinds of these gremlins "we who have to interface with Windows".

B4Print.com - Index


----------



## andreww (Nov 20, 2002)

mguertin said:


> I would suspect a lot of this is a result of your Windows 2003 file server. Sounds like it's eating resource forks (if the files show up as "unix" files that's exactly what's happened to them). This will mangle Quark files, fonts and EPS files to varying degrees of usability.
> 
> If there are similar problems with some of the fonts that would also account for the Suitcase issues (it barfs pretty badly on damaged fonts), the missing fonts that are in your fonts folder and entourage crashes (likely a damaged/conflicted font -- check the helvetica family).
> 
> ...


Thanks for your response. All our 20+ machines connect via SMB and have been doing so without issue for some time on Leopard. I concur with your theory about resource forks, but have to wonder why I can not read a file on my Snow Leopard machine, yet can move one seat over and the file will behave normally on Leopard. If the forks are indeed being pooched, the results are only being shown in Snow Leopard. The frustrating thing is that I can find almost now mentions of this issue on the web, suggesting that it is not a wide spread problem, yet the same symptoms are present on all three of my Snow Leopard machines.


----------



## Guest (Nov 5, 2010)

This might help you to get to the bottom of it ... there were changes to SMB mounting with 10.6

10.6: Force the sytem to use ._ resource forks in SMB mounts - Mac OS X Hints


----------



## andreww (Nov 20, 2002)

Thanks mate!

Can someone clarify exactly what I have to do in terminal to make this work?


It turns out to be related to the 'NTFS Streams' feature of SMB mounts, so if we disable those, then all is well. To do this globally (per machine), we need to create /etc/nsmb.conf, or add the streams line below to the [default] section if the file already exists:

#######
[default]
streams=no
#######

I used Terminal to make this change: sudo vi /etc/nsmb.conf.


----------



## andreww (Nov 20, 2002)

So here's what I did, as the Terminal directions were incomplete.

1. Used Cocktail to enable invisible files.

2. In Finder, navigated to ~/Etc

3. Located the file smb.conf and forced it to open with Text Edit

4. Replaced everything in that file with the following;

#######
[default]
streams=no
#######

5. Saved As nsmb.conf to the desktop

6. In finder, copied the nsmb.conf file in to ~/Etc

7. Restarted.


That worked great on my MBP, and server directories looked as they should once again!


Funny thing is that when I tried the same thing on my Mac Pro, I couldn't get it to work. When I had saved the file on my MBP from Text Edit, there was a warning about the selected file format. On my Mac Pro, there was no such warning and the files icon was different (text icon instead of a plain white icon). The info panel showed the file to actually be named nsmb.conf.txt even though I'd specified the extension I wanted. Anyway, I didn't feel like troubleshooting yet another issue so I simply used the file that I had created on my MBP for the remaining two machines.

I've got the font problem solved by abandoning Suitcase altogether. I needed to download and install all new Xerox drivers for our printers as both of those stopped working. So aside from a couple of minor issues I'm good to go. As for installing SL on the remaining 20 machines? Don't think thats going to happen anytime soon


----------



## chas_m (Dec 2, 2007)

andreww said:


> -magic mouse works like crap in indesign


I too have noticed this and I'm unsure how to get around it. I suppose there's a way to disable MM's features on a per-application basis, but I'm too lazy to find it just now.

Other than that, I love the Magic Mouse.


----------



## wonderings (Jun 10, 2003)

chas_m said:


> I too have noticed this and I'm unsure how to get around it. I suppose there's a way to disable MM's features on a per-application basis, but I'm too lazy to find it just now.
> 
> Other than that, I love the Magic Mouse.


What issues are you having with the Magic Mouse and Indesign? I use Indesign most of the day and use a Magic Mouse and dont have any issues, well none that I notice. Worked fine in CS4 and have had no issues in CS5 either.


----------

