Quark on Wednesday introduced QuarkXPress 9, a major upgrade to its flagship desktop publishing software for Mac OS X and Windows. It’s priced at $799; upgrades from QuarkXPress 7 and 8 cost $299. QuarkXPress 9 ships in April.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]Central to the new version of QuarkXPress is the App Studio, a design environment to help users bring content to the iPad. Blio eReader support enables QuarkXPress users to repurpose content for e-book distribution on iOS, Android and Silverlight. QuarkXPress 9 also now includes export support for ePUB, the open e-book standard supported by devices like iPads (via iBooks), Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle.

New features in QuarkXPress 9 to appeal to designers include new Conditional Styles, which lets you automatically style content based on rules; MS Word-compatible bullets and numbering; a Collouts feature that moves boxes and groups automatically with text; a “ShapeMaker” wizard; grid-based image import and image captioning; and more.