Renowned voice in DTP/instruction world gives insights on what he thinks is the better design platform
David Blatner is a design consultant who was one of QuarkXPress’s leading evangelists. So bullish was he on it that he had garnered the nickname “Mr. QuarkXPress”.
In addition to this he has authored (and co-authored) a number of books on QuarkXPress, such as The QuarkXPress Book and QuarkXPress Tips & Tricks. When David Blatner talks, people listen.
At the recent InDesign Conference in San Francisco, Blatner held forth with personal views on which platform is better and where the future lies. As quoted by Publish.com’s Kathy White, “I was all excited about Quark introducing tables to QuarkXPress. Then I saw InDesign 2.0 and thought ‘Quark sucks.’ ”
Kathy White’s entire article…which includes Blatner naming his top five features (and 10 other pretty cool ones) is worthwhile reading and can be found here.
Its too early to speculate that big. I think InDesign has all the mind share lately, but Quark XPress has all the market share: 80%. XPress is still DTP’s favorite page layout program. I think Xpress v7 will deicde that whether Indesing or Xpress will be the future of DTP. In my opinion they both will co-exist, which will be better for customers.
Samuel, you should probably quote Bill Troop if you’re going to cut and paste the intro to his article verbatim. If you’re going to quote someone and you want people to take you seriously, you might want to cite a more objective article instead of the blatent Quark propaganda Troop called a review.
Current market share is not a clear indication of market direction. What you need to look at is the kind of files going to printers. All of my printers have said that they are receiving InDesign-native files and InDesign PDFs more and more frequently. Moreover, that 80% market share is inclusive of all versions of Quark. Many still use Quark 4, and it’s nearly 10 years old. You can’t look at a 10-year-old program to define the future of professional design.
Currently, Quark is challenged by trying to get feature parity with InDesign AND create new features because feature parity isn’t enough. When I look toward the future of desktop publishing, I look at Adobe’s Creative Suite. Maybe Quark 7 will change that, but from what we’ve seen so far, I’m not going to hold my breath. Quark doesn’t have the reputation of delivering on their promises.
Jeff: thank you for your voice on this. You raise excellent points which are, I fear, much too infrequently touched on, particularly Quark’s drive at feature parity, as well as while Quark is still a huge share of the market, market share isn’t a dependable metric in as much as the majority of Quark customers are still using V4. As a matter of fact, I’d go so far as to say that if there is a huge weakness in XPress needs to be addressed for Quark to survive, it’s probably that one.
I look for as much chatter on the subject as I can, and am a regular visitor to the Sofa threads (casual discussion area) on Quark’s own forums, and V5 is talked about with scorn-when it’s talked about at all.
Despite the inveighings of the Quark fans that have posted here, Quark doesn’t need to ‘redefine the publishing industry’, it needs to bring XPress up to where InDesign is now, and also make a compelling case for an upgrade.
As an aside, I did read that Troop review; the comment referenced is a near-enough letter-perfect copy. People, if you want to have a pro-Quark stance and post accoridingly, that’s okay by me…I continue to hope that some happy Quark customers can post comments and we can have a real discussion about it because…hey, I like talking layout apps. But, and I’m speaking personally here, you can’t expect me to hold my respect for you if the best you can do is cut and paste from someone else’s review.
Jeff cited the review as weak, and I concur. It treats the v6.5 update as worldbeating, and touts multi-undos, PSD Import, and QuarkVista as the postcards did…as though nobody else did them.
The punchline to that joke is that the review was written in May, 2005…after InDesign CS2 came out…which supports PSD importing with layers.
On the topic of the Troop review …
I’m probably speaking out of school, but what the hell.
A few weeks ago Quark’s marketing department contacted me inquiring about seting up a conversation regarding “what Quark can do for bloggers.” While I don’t consider QuarkVSInDesign.com a blog per se–it’s a blog-format news and editorial site–it was an intriguing contact.
Quark would be stupid to get involved in creating blog software, therefore the contact was not to join a focus group to help build new software. Besides, it wouldn’t be the marketing department making contact if it had anything to do with development. Clearly, Quark–who, again, reads this site daily–has taken note of the fact that QuarkVSInDesign.com is reaching Quark’s users. The story we ran on the first round of Quark’s postcards was plastered all over the Quark Forums, with comments that echoed what was posted here.
That particular conversation never happened, but I’ve heard through the grapevine that the reason was because someone deemed me “unbribeable”.
As I recall, that was a few weeks before the Bill Troop review.
But then again, Troop has always towed the Quark party line and harshly criticized Adobe’s every move–even when it made no sense. Troop is the only person I know, for example, that thinks OpenType fonts are bad. He’s spouted venom about them all over the place, claiming that the only reason for OpenType fonts to exist is to make money for Adobe and Microsoft (the main collaborators on the original technology). In fact, he goes so far as to say that “real pros” don’t use Adobe fonts, they use Font Bureau typefaces.
It’s no secret that Troop possesses such a strong disdain for the company that he could be easily characterized as anti-Adobe.
Samuel, I’ve respected your arguments before, and so I say with the utmost respect to and of you, that you should rethink citing Bill Troop.
Oh, and, by the way, Samuel, Quark does not hold 80% marketshare. Quark runs about telling people that it does, but that’s three year old data–and it was incomplete and skewed then. Marketshare counts against not only InDesign but also against PageMaker and, in some markets, FrameMaker.
Quark hasn’t done a marketshare analysis in the last three years, and they haven’t done a comprehensive one in at least ten. Adobe has, but Adobe is hardly impartial. So just look at the independent research into Quark’s slipping markets–the Pfeiffer Report is a good start. Then consider what version of Quark holds sway in the market.
Market share is an indicator of future sales potential; installed user base is something entirely different. Quark 4 is deeply penetrated, yes, but Quark 6.x is marginally part of the market. As Mr. Klein noted above, Quark 5 is a joke–roughly seven people bought Quark 5, and I’m two of them. :-)
Quark is losing its war. Even Jay Nelson, who stands squarely on Quark’s side in the war, recognizes that.
Marketing and paid for editorial won’t help Quark defeat its two primary rivals: Older Quark software and InDesign.
I wonder if 80% of the 80% marketshare Quark claims it has, is gathering dust on designers’ shelves.
Well…Yes I quoted Bill Troop. I didn’t know that you people know Bill that well. Now I have decided not to utter even a single word till I get my hands on Xpress v7. Indesign CS is a good software, but I have attended Quark summit where they showed Xpress v7’s some features and let me tell you I am really excited to work on v7, and this is not only with me but with everyone who was there. When ever I get the pre-release version, I will do feature by feature analyisis and will let you know my findings. Till now what experience I have with Indesign and what I have seen in Xpress v7, I think Xpress is my first choice. But this may change after I see what the full package is all about.
Bill’s article is pretty notorious because it really infuriated InDesign users. I have absolutely no problem debating the merits of a program, but be fair to both programs. Troop wasn’t, and his bias was clear. The sad part is some Quark supporters are too blind to see through it. I hope you’re not one of them.
His article has little (if any) merit. He was comparing an old version of InDesign (as SJK mentioned, CS2 features had been announced long before the article was posted) to a yet-to-be-released version of Quark (and they haven’t even publicized a timetable for that release – for all we know, we may be comparing Quark 7 to InDesign CS3). In the future, I hope you can see the difference between objectivity (sites like this one or creativepro.com) and nonsensical propaganda (Bill Troop or X‑Ray Magazine).
We’ve made the switch to InDesign, and I truly doubt 7 will get me to CONSIDER switching back. I’m very happy with CS2. I hope you see where my skepticism comes from. I just refuse to hold my breath waiting for 7 when Quark has such a horrible reputation for shafting customers and producing buggy software. As I said before, they have the challenge of creating new features and catching up with ones introduced in InDesign. I don’t think they can do it completely in one revision. It’s an uphill battle for them.