Xerox Phaser 8560 and Quark 6.5 PDF incompatibility

Mar 07, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: gregarios

I recently upgraded my Xerox Phaser 8400DP to a Phaser 8560DN printer. A few days later, when I attempted to output a PDF file using QuarkXPress 6.52, all I would get was an alert box stating that Quark was "Unable to create the xyz.pdf file." This was now happening consistently. Well, thanks to Quark's extremely detailed error reporting, I could tell immediately what the problem was ... NOT!

After hours of troubleshooting dead-ends, I finally figured out that when the Phaser 8560 printer was selected as the default printer, Quark would error instead of outputting PDFs. If any other printer was selected as default, Quark would instantly resume its PDF outputting capability.

I called Xerox, and after a nice session of less than 20 minutes, a support person actually took my word for it! While I waited, they installed their drivers for the new printer on a similar Powermac G4 to mine, opened a Quark 6.5 they already had installed, and tried the same (reproducible) technique to cause the error. They agreed that it was a verifiable error that is evidently caused by an incompatibility between Quark 6.5 and their new print drivers. They sent the problem on to their application programming technicians so that they could address the issue in the next bug-fix run. They could not, however, give me an ETA on that, but at least we know it is a Xerox issue.

The Problem: Anyone with a Power Mac who has Quark 6.x installed and a Phaser 8560 has a good possibility of not being able to export to PDF files. It is unknown if Intel Macs are affected.

The Workaround: Change the default printer to any other driver before attempting to output the PDF, and install an updated Xerox driver when it becomes available.

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