QuarkXPress 7: Early Returns From Two Experts

The first impressions of QuarkXPress are in, and they're already mixed.

QuarkXPress 7 is final­ly released into the wild, and the design com­mu­ni­ty has final­ly begun to exhale. 

While not nec­es­sar­i­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the cre­ative reac­tion to fol­low, two ear­ly opin­ions are notable due to thi­er sources and what they say. Sandee Cohen and Galen Gruman are two names who should require no expla­na­tion; both are acknowl­edged lay­out appli­ca­tion experts with deep expe­ri­ence (and pub­lished how-to books) about how to use InDesign (in Sandee’s case) and QuarkXPress (in Galen’s). Each pro­fes­sion­al’s reac­tion is as dif­fer­ent as it is unexpected.

Sandee Cohen: Impressed by XPress 7

Sandee’s reac­tion is over­all very pos­i­tive: her ini­tial impres­sions, pub­lished here at CreativePro​.com, see the improv­ments (Composition Zones, trans­paren­cy con­trol, Job Jackets) time­ly and promis­ing, and some­thing that will keep Quark in the game (though she does agree that XPress is no longer the king of the mountain):

Will QuarkXPress regain its over­whelm­ing dom­i­nance of the page-layout mar­ket? I think those days are over. Too many com­pa­nies have already switched to InDesign. I don’t believe a com­pa­ny that switched to InDesign will switch again to QuarkXPress 7. There are just too many con­sid­er­a­tions and com­pli­ca­tions. And it’s not just InDesign’s own fea­tures that have made it attrac­tive; it’s the inte­gra­tion between all the Creative Suite products.

But will QuarkXPress whith­er and blow away? Absolutely not!

Galen Gruman: We Waited For This?

Galen Gruman’s reac­tion (read­able here at Macworld), how­ev­er, seems as under­whelmed as Sandee Cohen’s was upbeat.

Taking a look at the same improv­ments that Sandee did he found them, while need­ed, unim­pres­sive and large­ly coun­ter­in­tu­itve. Job Jackets anc Composition Zones are good fea­tures but of lim­it­ed appeal and, at best, coun­ter­in­tu­itve­ly imple­ment­ed. Most of the rest of the new fea­tures are “me-too” improv­ments match­ing InDesign’s func­tion­al­i­ty, though trans­paren­cy did get high marks for being bet­ter than InDesign’s.

Overall, it did­n’t seem worth the wait. As Gruman him­self says in his review:

Unfortunately, XPress 7 does not rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant leap for­ward. The new release com­bines pri­mar­i­ly me-too addi­tions with some still-evolving orig­i­nal fea­tures that have lim­it­ed appeal for Quark’s broad base of print design­ers. Most of QuarkXPress 7’s tru­ly new fea­tures tar­get work­groups, mak­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion easier.

However, that choice will like­ly dis­ap­point many rank-and-file design­ers, espe­cial­ly if they’re at small­er firms that don’t work in large teams. 

Two acknowl­edged experts. One cel­e­brat­ed work­horse appli­ca­tion. Two dif­fer­ing opin­ions. Let the reviews commence!

QuarkXPress 7, reviews, analysis

49 thoughts on “QuarkXPress 7: Early Returns From Two Experts

  1. woz

    I would agree with Sandee Cohen. Once you switch your stu­dio to InDesign there’s no going back even if you want­ed to. There’s sim­ply no way for Xpress to open the InDesign files. (Except for Markzware’s plu­g­in, but it’s not pre­fect and com­pat­i­ble with the lat­est ver­sions of InDesign and/or Xpress).

  2. Samuel John Klein

    Good point, woz.

    BTW, I want to point out that I was tipped off to Sandee’s colum by woz, who made a link in the last one of the last com­ments he made her. Tip ‘o’ the cap to you, woz; good call.

  3. woz

    No problem.Happy could con­tribute some­thing usefull.

  4. Aris Batsioulas

    Does “trans­paren­cy” in QXP7 mean just “opac­i­ty”? I have been look­ing for blend­ing modes but see noth­ing. How can one cope with the absence of Multiply?

  5. Samuel John Klein

    When peo­ple speak of ‘trasparen­cy’ in XPress 7 they are indeed talk­ing about what the appli­ca­tions calls “Opacity”

    There is a real rea­son why XPress 7 does not include Multply as a blend­ing option but it’s a bit beyond my ken to explain why.

  6. Damo

    I think if Quark con­tin­ues to get “bagged” by design­ers, pub­lish­ers and print hous­es in favour of the sin­gle user inter­face that Creative Suite prod­ucts offer the DTP indus­try will with­in 5 years be look­ing at an Adobe monopoly. 

    The day (if God for­bid it should hap­pen) Adobe drove Quark into the grave would be the day they will charge us what­ev­er they like and offer decreased prod­uct sup­port in keep­ing with the lack of com­pe­ti­tion with­in the DTP marketplace.

    I find it amus­ing to see so many peo­ple in the indus­try who only seem to know the Adobe user inter­face with its var­i­ous tool­bar and palette con­gest­ed appli­ca­tions. If con­front­ed with a work­place that uses Quark they are like ducks out of water. I was taught a long time ago its best to learn all rel­e­vant soft­ware “just in case” you ever work in a stu­dio that favours one or the other.

    Meanwhile what does the future of DTP hold for us? Microsoft (that giant com­pa­ny) has had 2 rum­blings this year that may turn into tidal waves. Microsoft intends to release it own ver­sion of pdf called metro and its own ver­sion of jpeg. Apparently metro will advance the Office suite and Publisher to the next lev­el… mak­ing them print ready. Would any­one ever be naïve enough to believe Microsoft would stand idle while Adobe took a stran­gle­hold on the graph­ics indus­try with its pdf workflow.

    Microsoft the next big play­er in DTP and graph­ics file for­mats? Get ready coz its coming.

  7. Siegmar Foerster

    A time ago I wrote to Quark’s wish­list that they should give Quark 7 for free to all remain­ing users and come up asap with Quark 8 , with all the fea­tures of IDCS2 and the expect­ed fea­tures of IDCS3 already includ­ed. With that Quark would have an appli­ca­tion worth to pay for. As a con­vert to ID this is still my opinion.

  8. woz

    The way I under­stand it, blend­ing modes are not pos­si­ble in Xpress 7. It’s just the transparan­cy, ehm opacity.

  9. Samuel John Klein

    Seigmar:

    I guess the “new, friend­ly Quark” does­n’t extend that far, neh?

    Seriously, I’ve not­ed the var­i­ous strate­gies that Quark has imple­ment­ed to get 4.x users on board, and as a 6.5 own­er I feel like we’re just expect­ed to upgrade with­out get­ting an incentive.

    They seem more con­cerned with get­ting the lag­gards to play catchup than to keep faith­ful cus­tomers cur­rent. I’m not say­ing they should give away the store, but I think it’s rather unfair not to give the faith­ful at least some­thing for being faithful.

  10. swiss

    Quark 7 looks nice on first sight but I real­ly expect­ed more … much more of it. I am look­ing for­ward to InDesign CS3 to kick XPresss’ 7 pASSport. The only real­ly cool thing is that you can make a gra­di­ent from a col­or to trans­paren­cy (I do miss such a func­tion in Indd)…

  11. woz

    Blend your col­or to white and set transparan­cy to mul­ti­ply does­n’t do the trick for you?

  12. swiss

    nope … at least not when there is an image behind the gradient .…

  13. Pj

    I’m just curi­ous if any of you are famil­iar with the print­ing seps and the use of trans­paren­cies? What you see isn’t always what you get. It’s great if you want to use it for the web, but when it comes to print­ing and send­ing a file thru a RIP… good luck with using white at 0 trans. :)

  14. Ted Moon

    I have updat­ed to Quark 7 tonight and did a cur­so­ry tour of the pro­gram, so be aware of this when reading.

    I absolute­ly agree that shar­ing and oth­er col­lab­o­ra­tive func­tions found in the new ver­sion of Quark is attrac­tive, but use­less for most small design­ers. And the fea­tures that Quark imple­ment­ed was to “catch-up” with Adobe’s InDesign. However, this is not why I am excit­ed about Quark 7. It is because Quark final­ly caught up with InDesign, sort of.
    Because I use Quark at work, I am forced to use use and mas­ter it. Personally, i use Adobe’s InDesign. Why switch? because there are two fac­tions of desk­top pro­grams, it is safe to learn and use both. In the end, it’s about using what the client wants and what the print ven­dor can out­put. So yes, pdf improve­ments, lay­out improve­ments, font improve­ments, real­ly I’m talk­ing back to basics and more impor­tant­ly, it’s about mak­ing mon­ey. So there should no argu­ment about which is bet­ter, InDesign “pushed” their way in the mar­ket and will not go away. Fine, learn it, use it, charge more for it. In the end, isn’t that what design all about? Communicate and show me the money.

  15. swiss

    who cares about the design­ers pref­er­ences when it comes to data­base dri­ven appli­ca­tion such as brand man­age­ment systems?
    there is some devel­op­ers that NEED to find out which one of the two is more suit­able for they app and which of the two is worth the risk when think­ing of the future. and when you final­ly find out that it is much faster and thus cheap­er to pro­duce pages in this or that app that you have your mon­ey aspect. I do not know what cumulus+quark will bring up but I know that there are quite a few sexy InDesign+InCopy database-apps around …

  16. tim

    Ted, why would you charge your clients more for using InDesign? It’s not about what soft­ware you use to get the job done. It’s about the end prod­uct! If you charge more just to do some­thing in InDesign you are dig­ging your­self a cor­po­rate grave.

  17. Ted Moon

    I am not say­ing to charge more because the design­er uses InDesign. I am say­ing that because design­ers now have to learn both pro­grams, this increas­es costs for both the design­er and the client. If I have to learn both pro­grams, buy both pro­grams, then I have to make sure I can recoup my costs and invest­ment in time. Obviously this might not hold in the free mar­ket, but isn’t every­one tired of los­ing projects just becuase they don’t know one or the oth­er program?
    Perhaps I was being too lit­er­al in my last posting.
    I appre­ci­ate both pro­grams equal­ly but now I must keep up with both of them as well so I can in turn, hold my val­ue to both clients, and to the com­pa­ny I work for.

  18. woz

    Most design­ers at my com­pa­ny design using a pen­cil and a mark­er. After that they cre­ate ‘presentation-ready’ art­work in Illustrator and or InDesign. Me and my col­legues will take care of the rest. We’ll take over with the final text, picures and details. In the end we’ll cre­ate the prop­er cer­ti­fied PDF’s. We talk the printer-lingo. They can focus on the design and art­work, and I wil focus the tec­ni­cal part of the job. (If ness­esary, they’re just one door away). So far, Illustrator and InDesign makes it far more eas­i­er for them to realise your ideas. Both the design­ers and the DTP-ers dreadded the change from Xpress at first, but now? If they can’t use InDesign and or Illustrator they get mad. Really…

  19. woz

    By the way:
    “nope … at least not when there is an image behind the gra­di­ent â€¦.”
    There’s noth­ing wrong with an image behind a transparant gra­di­ant. Don’t know how or where you got that idea? Problems can hap­pen with spot­col­ors and transparay because some peo­ple use blend-effects com­bined with the spot­col­ors and that’s not ‘a good idea’. (under­state­ment).

  20. canty

    i am a pro pho­tog­ra­ph­er and use the cs2 cre­ative suite and have tryed to use quark, but still like inde­sign because you can use all the same short cut keys,drag and drop .ai and PSD files and donet have to cre­ate eps files
    inde­sign rocks!

  21. damo

    In Design is aimed at peo­ple who like one user inter­face. ie – the sim­ple. Its not about whether that user inter­face is the most speed effi­cient or appro­pri­ate for that soft­ware. Its just that every­thing is right where you expect it to be in the “Adobe World”. When you open your Adobe prod­uct your pulse slows and your heart stops pound­ing… the stress leaves you… ahhh every­thing is right where it should be… nobody messed with your per­fect Adobe world. The fact that you are buy­ing 3 pro­grams which run the same user inter­face which btw also share a mul­ti­tude of oth­er fea­tures… as a bun­dled pack­age seems to slip your mind. Wow. thats awe­some! What great val­ue for mon­ey!! (are you serious?)

    Meanwhile the com­pa­ny Adobe is full steam ahead with anti-competition buy­outs of its oppo­si­tion like Macromedia. Ignorant peo­ple bury their heads in the sand not know­ing the true cost of allow­ing any one com­pa­ny to mono­plise an industry. 

    If you rel­ish a sin­gle graph­ics soft­ware user inter­face so much per­haps you will also rel­ish the monop­oly adobe will have soon and rel­ish the free reign they will have over price and qual­i­ty of ser­vice / sup­port once that hap­pens? The fact is Adobe was forced into its cur­rent posi­tion by com­pe­ti­tion. But once the com­pe­ti­tion is gone… 

    Do you seri­ous­ly think they would not raise prices the moment they have the mar­ket­place to them­selves? Do you think bun­dled prod­ucts would remain bun­dled in a non-competitive indus­try? Have you ever known qual­i­ty and cus­tomer sup­port to increase dur­ing a monopoly?

  22. Tony Morse

    I fail to see the point you’re mak­ing. Are you sug­gest­ing that we should use Quark 7 sole­ly so Adobe does­n’t end up with a monop­oly on the busi­ness? Sorry, I’ll con­tin­ue to choose the soft­ware I use based on ease of use and qual­i­ty of features.

  23. damo

    Use both is what I’m say­ing obvi­ous­ly. Unfortunately this site is an altar at which on In Design is wor­shipped as though that prod­uct has no short comings. 

    I am for­tu­nate enough to know all the rel­e­vant print graph­ics soft­ware. CS2, Freehand, Quark etc. Unfortunately most edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions are now pre­dom­i­nant­ly only teach­ing Adobe. That will with­out a doubt lead to a sole­ly Adobe pur­chas­ing com­mu­ni­ty of young print design­ers and users with­in 3 years.

    Sites like this with its strong empha­sis on Adobe are in no way help­ing to avoid a monop­oly out­come. Actually I find the name of this site to be a lie. As fre­quent­ly what is being com­pared is not Quark and In Design but Quark and CS. A bun­dle of graph­ics prod­ucts which we all know Quark is not going to be capa­ble of producing.

    You should come clean and call this site Quark bash­ing by CS users.

  24. woz

    Haha. Everything you say ‘might hap­pen’ has already hap­pend­ed. Exept not with Adobe but with Quark Inc. And we should reward them for it by giv­ing them our mon­ey for their ‘catch-up’ ‘one tick pony’? For exam­le: There is no real com­petion for Photoshop. In your view Adobe must stop devel­op­ment because there’s no com­pe­ti­tion, right? Well just look­ing at Photoshop the last years will show you the prod­uct con­tineus to grow with use­full fea­tures. Oh and the last thing I want is a ‘one pro­gram that can do pix­els, lay­out and illus­tra­tion’. Dear God, let’s keep things seper­at­ed o.k.? And I don’t think it’s Pariah’s fault there’s so much new stuff going on at Adobe and not much real news at Quark.

  25. woz

    By the way, if this site is so pro-adobe why haven’t I read the ‘This is your brain on InDesign arti­cle here’?
    (Origionally post­ed in the Adobe forum)
    1) InDesign is cool; use InDesign.
    2) If you do not use InDesign, you are not cool. Be cool, use InDesign.
    3) The fur­ther exis­tence of the human race depends on InDesign; use InDesign.
    4) I like InDesign. You should like InDesign too. No cre­ative out­put can be made with­out InDesign. Use InDesign.
    5) Without InDesign the earth as we know it will cease to exist. Use InDesign.
    6)Nobody does­n’t like InDesign. Use InDesign.
    7) I am a veg­etable. Even veg­eta­bles use InDesign. Use InDesign.
    8) The spir­tu­al cen­ters of all major reli­gions and about a dozen minor reli­gions agree that InDesign is pleas­ing to their diety/god (even Mighty Cthulhu). Use InDesign.
    9) InDesign does not cause flat­u­lence. Use InDesign.
    10) Four out of five den­tists rec­om­mend InDesign. Use InDesign.
    11) Osama Bin Laden does not use InDesign. Use InDesign.
    12) InDesign pairs well with any food. Use InDesign.
    13) InDesign has twice (2x) the stain fight­ing action of the lead­ing nation­al brand. Use InDesign.
    14) InDesign has the abil­i­ty to beat the s*** out of your dad. Use InDesign.
    15) InDesign will pull your fin­ger. Use InDesign.
    16) InDesign will not stain most fab­rics. Use InDesign.
    17) InDesign works bet­ter with the ladies than Barry White. Use InDesign.
    18) InDesign is less fill­ing and tastes great. Use InDesign.
    19) InDesign was giv­en to human­i­ty by the aliens that crashed near Roswell. Use InDesign.
    20) InDesign. Use InDesign. Please.

  26. Chris

    I use both InDesign and Xpress from their begin­nings. I have nev­er changed between them due to fea­tures. I switch between them when I run into bugs. For me that’s the ulti­mate killer fea­ture – No Bugs. InDesign 2.02 had seri­ous bugs inthe PDF gen­er­a­tion. X4.11 had bugs too. I just upgrad­ed both, IDCS2 for $169 and X7 for $249. Interesting that X7 still costs more. Adobe is a very eth­i­cal com­pa­ny. They have had mahor mar­ket share in many areas for years, and their pric­ing is always fair. Even if Quark dies, Adobe will not chage their prices much. They can’t, the mar­ket won’t allow that. People just won’t buy the upgrades. Ask Microsoft about that, they have 99% mar­ket share with Windows, but when they try to charge too much peo­ple don’t buy. Competition or mar­ket will­ing­ness to pay, both accom­plish the same thing. Adobe has had major prob­lems get­ting exisit­ng cus­tomers to keep buy­ing upgrades. Most soft­ware ends up com­pet­ing against it’s old­er ver­sions far more than oth­er brands.

  27. woz

    Good point. Adobe saw what hap­pened to Quark. Overhere in Europe they now adver­tise with ‘the most impor­tant update since 3.3’. Wow, why did I buy 4, 5 and 6?

  28. TIm

    Never choose to have only one choice.

  29. B

    I agree with one of the above posters that Adobe is cheat­ing users by bundling soft­ware that con­tain the same or extreme­ly sim­i­lar fea­tures and call­ing them seper­ate prod­ucts. I don’t real­ly think of it as immoral use of pow­er, more of the idea that there is still the option to buy each pro­gram seper­ate­ly, why spend more mon­ey and alien­ate more users that­to make an all-in-one appli­ca­tion? How would it alien­tate? Some peo­ple want Photoshop and are scared of Illustrator… If they were crammed togeth­er in an obvoious fash­ion, some new users would­n’t buy it. (I beleive in time, this will not be the case and Adobe will offer a lim­it­ed all-in-one app, how­ev­er there needs to be more mod­u­la­tion between the Macromedia takeover and Adobe’s own lim­it­ed upgrade features).

    As far as which one I pre­fer, not that it matters- I use both. Which ever one allows me not just to get the job done, but to get the job done faster and with less wor­ry… That’s the one I’ll use. I give a rat’s @$$ about how pret­ty some­thing is. Give me the func­tion­al­i­ty to make what I need hap­pen, happen.

  30. woz

    Give me the func­tion­al­i­ty to make what I need hap­pen, hap­pen.” True. Bot often peo­ple don’t know what they want until they see it. PSD import, transparan­cy, layer-effects, PDF, Open Type sup­port, etc. You would have to agree that all this comes from Adobe’s kitchen. Not Quarks. They did noth­ing to push pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Just col­lect cash…

  31. Peter

    woz,

    whoc cares who invent­ed it?
    Do you dri­ve a car? Which model?
    Wheels = Egyptians; Car & Engine = Germans.

    And box­es, pt lead­ing, multi-ink col­ors etc. (in page lay­out apps) = Quark. 

    WHO CARES?

    The bet­ter one makes the show.

    Peter

  32. Kevin Newell

    I think it is sil­ly to think that Adobe would raise it’s prices once it dom­i­nates the mar­ket. They dom­i­nate the vec­tor graph­ics mar­ket with Illustrator now that Freehand is all but gone. They did­n’t hike up the price for Illustrator. Photoshop has always been the raster manip­u­la­tion, and pho­to edit­ing stan­dard it is still very fair­ly priced. They own the .pdf mar­ket place and Acrobat is still rea­son­able as well and Reader being free.

    Adobe is a good com­pa­ny, and just becuase there is no direct com­pe­ti­tion does­n’t mean they become an evil empire. They have and all ways will be a fair soft­ware coma­pa­ny. Microsoft is always going to be there and even if it wasn;t I feel they would stay fair.

    Adobe CS is attrac­tive, and prived to com­pete with just Xpress. Offering top to bot­tom graph­ics, lay­out, and print­ing solu­tions. To be in the same price range with all of that vs. Quarks Layout app just goes to show you that Adobe is good people.

  33. damo

    Vector graph­ics is hard­ly a monop­oly. You’re waaaay off track right there. 

    Furthermore any­one who thinks In Design will stay same price of cheap­er after Quark is gone “because the mar­ket won’t allow it” lacks basic eco­nom­ic under­stand­ing. The mar­ket will pay what a com­pa­ny that has a monop­oly charges – its sim­ple. “The mar­ket won’t allow it”??? Haha thats the fun­ni­est thing I’ve read on this site to date! In a monop­oly there is no mar­ket dic­tat­ing prices. Some peo­ple post­ing here seem to miss that glar­ing­ly obvi­ous fact.

    When com­pe­ti­tion no longer exists the mar­ket can get stuffed. To the monop­oly experts – please inform me of a few monop­o­lies of late where prices, prod­ucts and ser­vice actu­al­ly “improved”??

    Insane.

  34. damo

    Oh yeah and thanks for the top 20 woz. 

    Don’t give up your day job and def­i­nite­ly don’t expect any phone calls from the Letterman Show re: vacan­cies for the “Top Ten” job.

    I can tell that took you some time and effort and for that you should be applaud­ed – by some­one… somewhere

  35. Martin

    Here’s anoth­er one of these arti­cles “Why InDesign can make your cof­fee taste much sweet­er than Quark”:

    http://​www​.lay​ers​magazine​.com/​i​n​d​esign/

    Very unbi­ased, neu­tral arti­cle.… wait, strange, these guys make mon­ey with Adobe prod­ucts. Hm, why does InDesign win here I wonder???

    When do peo­ple final­ly real­ize and see that there is no neu­tral study? Wake up and test your­self. Any study, any con­sul­tant will make a study in the favor of the per­son pay­ing for it or becuase he/she sees a way of makign mon­ey with con­sult­ing after hav­ing adver­tised a cer­tan direc­tion, some­thing “com­plete­ly new, only we know about us. Ask us, we help you!”.

    Hang in there
    Martin

  36. woz

    @Damo: RTFP. Ik was­n’t my list. I stum­bled upon it in the Adobe forum and re-posted it here. Who knows, maybe it was your boss’s list, and he does­n’t like Quarkheads, hmm?

    @Peter, It’s not about who invet­ed it. It’s about what com­pa­ny actu­al­ly INVENTS. It’s far more like­ly to expect new/better things from Adobe then from ‘that oth­er page lay­out company’. 

    @Martin, ofcourse. It’s the way the world works. But most peo­ple here are pro’s and have used or will use more then one sin­gle pro­gram. We can see through (most of the) ‘smoke and mir­rors’ from Adobe, Quark, and oth­ers. Even if we don’t we will find out soon enough when using the pro­gram. Anf because of the inter­net the world will know if we think it sucks! (This was the main rea­son Quark closed it forum short­ly after the release of Quark Xress 6). LOL…

  37. Peter

    woz,

    if “It’s not about who invent­ed it. It’s about what com­pa­ny actu­al­ly INVENTS. ” was true, then you should rave for Quark, as they invent­ed pre­ci­sion (box­es, lead­ing in pt sizes), made trans­paren­cies use­ful (attribute-level, not object lev­el) and gave advan­tage by imple­ment­ing PS-functionality in a lay­out app.

    By the way all things Adobe did copy (into PM) or will copy (e.g. box­es, gran­u­lar trans­paren­cies and Photoshop effects) into CS3.

    But still I some­how doubt you will now critize Adobe ;-)

    Greetings
    Peter

  38. woz

    Well I have done just that. One of my posts referred to ‘Adobe: The fish rots from the head first, arti­cle on http://​www​.dar​ing​fire​ball​.net. Pariah decid­ed to write an entire arti­cle about it. Read it for youre­selve: http://​quarkvsin​de​sign​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​2​0​0​6​/​0​5​/​e​n​o​u​g​h​-​w​h​i​n​i​n​g​-​a​b​o​u​t​-​t​h​e​-​a​d​o​b​e​-​m​a​c​r​o​m​e​d​i​a​-​m​erger/

    I’m not a ‘Adone-is-the-best-screw-all-the-rest. In fact, on my site http://​www​.mac​mo​jo​.nl you can read sev­er­al arti­cles about Adobe prod­ucts like Distiller with crazy self-heal func­tions, InDesign with not opti­mal transparan­cy flat­ten­ing stan­dards that can cause major prob­lems, ‘hid­den’ but very impor­tant pal­lets in Illustrator, stu­pid trans­la­tions for the old ‘over­print’ and the new­er transparan­cy func­tions, Adobe’s des­i­cion to split Acrobat into sev­er­al prod­ucts (Pro, and all that), Adobe’s choise for non-standard ISO ICC over­here in Europe, let­ting SWOP be the default for col­or­sync in Photoshop in Europe and ‘what not’. But it’s in Dutch. I’m think­ing about trans­lat­ing the arti­cles in English. A lot of the info is for European stan­dards, so I don’t know just how use­ful it might be in English…

  39. Martin

    Did any­one use Quark 7 yet in production?

    That’s maybe more inter­est­ing than “experts” telling us…

    Print on
    Martin

  40. Samuel John Klein

    Well, if I read my copies of X‑Ray Magazine right, that staff has been using QXP 7 for pro­duc­tion since 7 was in beta.

  41. Martin

    Samuel,

    that’s inter­est­ing to hear, do you have any feed­back from their side?

    Martin

  42. Samuel John Klein

    Martin:

    They’ve been pret­ty thrilled with the way QXP7’s been work­ing for them., and I take that as a sin­cere sen­ti­iment; QXP 7 is, I feel, a great improv­ment over QXP 6.x. A Quark user would be very pleased with the improv­ments on this.

  43. Paul L. Fuentes

    Comparison between Xpress & Indesign will be end­less, as long as there are dif­fer­ences in the way artists think & work, a flur­ry of infi­nite dif­fer­ing opin­ions will ensue. Suffice it to say that no sin­gle com­pa­ny can pro­vide “every­thing” what so enor­mous a crowd of users (with vary­ing ideo­syn­cra­cies), would ever need or want. As sim­ple as that. But let me con­grat­u­late both: Adobe for what Indesign now stands for and is capa­ble of doing; and, of course, Quark, for com­ing up with such a laud­able upgrade that for sure will keep it at the front of graph­ics indus­try in many years to come. I, myself, use both, and enjoy both. I think that’s gonna be that way for many years to come; as long as both strive improv­ing fea­tures at their own back­yard – prices will real­ly not mat­ter, bundling & oth­er mar­ket­ing tac­tics won’t make much of a dent. It’s always the new tricks & fea­tures that will thrill buy­ers & users. So instead of exchang­ing fum­ing words & rant­i­ngs, why not Quark & Indesign users try to out­shine one anoth­er with a piece of art­work or arti­cle that will inspire the world for noble ideas. So we may attain the true pur­pose of ART, which is greatness.

  44. damo

    Both soft­ware are already doing that (cre­at­ing inspir­ing artwork). 

    Its just that one “com­pa­ny” is screw­ing the mar­ket­place while their users are too busy con­grat­u­lat­ing each oth­er to notice. Adobe & Macromedia was bad – real bad.

  45. Paul Chernoff

    Our mag­a­zine switched from QuarkXPress 6.5/QPS 3 to InDesign CS2/K4 5.5 just one year ago and we nev­er looked back. I spend much less time fix­ing tech­ni­cal prob­lems (I’m the IT guy) and our design­ers are much hap­pi­er with InDesign.

    I spent a lot of time look­ing at QuarkXPress 7 betas before the change. While the inter­face is much improved and there are many improve­ments in the pro­gram, I was dis­ap­point­ed that fea­tures that are core to mag­a­zine pro­duc­tion were not improved (and I lob­bied Quark for a long time about these issues). Style sheets are much weak­er than InDesign and I found that design­ers tend­ed not to use them. I find since switch­ing to InDesign design­ers make much bet­ter use of style sheets due to InDesign’ allow­ing to build sytle sheets on one anoth­er, the ease in mod­i­fy­ing stylesheets and the pre­view capa­bil­i­ties. Likewise InDesign mas­ter pages are way supe­ri­or to QuarkXPress’. Inheritance is a major factor.

    And Quark still has not released QPS 4 yet, mean­ing that my mag­a­zine could not even use QuarkXPress 7 since there is no work­flow soul­tion for it.

  46. NK

    I’m a bit fed up with peo­ple whin­ing that they’re scared of Adobe becom­ing a “graph­ics monop­oly”… come on, Adobe pio­neered this indus­try! Quark was the only real pub­lish­ing appli­ca­tion for a long time, and the com­pe­ti­tion for top spot in this area has been pret­ty fierce, but what about the rest of the DTP world? What com­pe­ti­tion has there real­ly EVER been for Photoshop? PhotoPaint? Fireworks? how about (spit on the ground as I type this) Paintshop Pro? Don’t make me laugh.
    What com­pe­ti­tion has there even been for Illustrator? Corel Draw & Freehand? Don’t make me hurl my cook­ies, pa-leease! (although, to be fair, Corel Draw does deserve sec­ond place). The point I’m mak­ing is that it would be no exxager­a­tion to say that dig­i­tal imag­ing as we know it was basi­cal­ly invent­ed by Adobe; Adobe is king of the hill at the moment because they’re a bril­liant com­pa­ny that pro­duces bril­liant, vision­ary software—not because the “com­petion” from all the oth­er also-ran com­pa­nies has been keep­ing them on their toes (snick­er).

  47. Mjenius

    You make a good point. I think we use the term monop­oly too loose­ly. And as much as I love Adobe, a lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion nev­er hurts. Adobe maybe king of the hill, but there tons of oth­er soft­ware that meet cer­tain needs. For exam­ple Painter is pre­ferred by by illus­tra­tors and for video edit­ing I like to use Final Cut Pro HD. I applaud Adobe for Lightroom, but it’s long over­due, many pho­tog­ra­phers hate pho­to­shop. Freehand and Fireworks has it’s bright sides too, when you’re work­ing with muliti­me­dia. And there’s Flash, which Adobe nev­er had a chance against. Well… until they bought Macromedia. Hey, if Quark still has it’s base, I think all these oth­er guys deserve to be around.

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