The IT Enquirer: QuarkXPress 7 bests InDesignCS3

A com­par­i­son of fea­tures and usage run by the tech web por­tal The IT Enquirer has Quark’s flag­ship QuarkXPress 7 beat­ing out InDesign CS3, accord­ing to a release post­ed on SourceWire.

According to the release, a num­ber of tests were run con­cen­trat­ing on the time tak­en to do sim­i­lar tasks, and qual­i­ta­tive con­clu­sions were drawn with respect to cre­ativ­i­ty, effi­cien­cy, and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. The results?

In rela­tion to speed the report found that QuarkXPress per­formed bet­ter in 79% of the tests com­pared to 21% for InDesign. It was also deter­mined that QuarkXPress 7 has bet­ter sup­port for design depart­ments where more than one per­son needs to con­trol and man­age the lay­out process by offer­ing sup­port for Job Jackets, Composition Zones and shar­ing colour man­age­ment ele­ments. InDesign CS3 was seen to have bet­ter sup­port for fast table for­mat­ting and long-document features.

The release does give InDesign CS3 cred­it for inter­face and obvi­ous access to cre­ative tools, but notes that access to some cre­ative tools involve invok­ing oth­er pro­grams, thus affect­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty at least by the time it takes to acti­vate those applications.

Readers are invit­ed to judge for them­selves: the report is avail­able for free from this link (free reg­is­tra­tion to IT Enquirer is required).

The IT Enquirer’s main site is http://​ww​.it​-enquir​er​.com.

57 thoughts on “The IT Enquirer: QuarkXPress 7 bests InDesignCS3

  1. Blah

    I can’t see QXP THAT much supe­ri­or as arti­cle sug­gests. Reviewer sim­ply revolves around two fea­tures ID does not have – Job Jackets and Composition Zones. Not hav­ing spent much time with QXP 7, I can’t be judge myself, but JJ are far from per­fect imple­ment­ed and do not appear as ground­break­ing as as they are mar­ket­ed. This is from Quark’s own user group and I can see ben­e­fit of com­po­si­tion zones in mul­ti user envi­ron­ment. However, I can spec­u­late a small per­cent­age of users actu­al­ly work this way. ID does the “same” the same as QXP Job Jacket fea­ture, only it is done at the end, while JJ are imple­ment­ed as you work (before). Multi-user edit­ing is irrel­e­vant for most users any­way. Either way I don’t see CS3 suck­ing as much as this arti­cle says. The rest…it’s known that unlike QuarkXPress, ID does not try to do it all. Some find going back to Illustrator/PS to make changes to graph­ics as step back­ward, I don’t. I can do/touch up things much better/faster in the rest of CS appli­ca­tions than QXP allows.

    Would love to get my hands on report. I reg­is­tered hours ago, but still have to get email.

  2. Samuel John Klein

    You make some very good points here. 

    To be hon­est, I was thrilled to track that report down. It seems to swim against what I see as the con­ven­tion­al wisdom–that QuarkXPress is very much improved but is still in the catch-up posi­tion with respect to InDesign.

    I’ve noticed oth­er opin­ions that hold that Quark’s improve­ment, while not­i­ca­ble and notable, won’t be used by all Quark-based design­ers, espe­cial­ly those who work solo. I myself tried the Job Jackets and found them unin­tu­itive to use, and com­po­si­tion zones are good but, again, good in the group way. Solo design­ers would­n’t use them much. 

    In the inter­ests of dis­clo­sure, I haven’t seen the report yet either; I’m still wait­ing for my reg­is­tra­tion to get approved.

  3. Blah

    Sorry on mis­takes in my first reply. I was inter­rupt­ed a cou­ple of times while writ­ing it that I did not pay atten­tion to obvi­ous mistakes.

    I haven’t seen the report yet. It’s been almost a day and still no email. I doubt reg­is­tra­tion will even be approved. If possible/allowed, could any­one share the report if he/she has it?

    I cer­tain­ly don’t think Quark is in any way bad. Version 7 is a big step for­ward for Quark users. I am just sur­prised that ID would be that far behind it in usabil­i­ty. ID’s UI itself feels more intu­itive and way more con­sis­tent than Quark’s in my expe­ri­ence. I just hope Quark works more on their UI in the future.

    While some fea­tures in all Adobe appli­ca­tions are hard­er to use/complicated than they should be (Illustrator expe­ri­ence), I find UI/shortcut uni­fi­ca­tion through­out their appli­ca­tions to be major pro­duc­tiv­i­ty booster.

    I can relate that long­time Quark user would do some things faster than in ID, which is nor­mal. If you don’t use some appli­ca­tion often then you’ll do things faster in the one you do, even if it’s more complex.

    Until I see the report, I can only see that he bases his effi­cien­cy facts on two fea­tures which do not exist in ID. Job Jackets are *for me* hard to use and very unin­tu­itive. Composition zones does have ben­e­fit and can improve pro­duc­tiv­i­ty when used in mul­ti user envi­ron­ments. For a sin­gle users it has no ben­e­fit at all *that I know of*. Those are known advan­tages, but I don’t see how those alone can have ID eat dust when it comes to productivity.

    We’ll see I guess. Thanks for the arti­cle. It’s been fun to read. I love head to head com­par­isons. It won’t have affect what I use, but I like know­ing strengths/weaknesses of both software.

  4. Blah

    Thanks for the link. Interesting read­ing. Whole world is not USA, so…

    It is prob­a­bly a move into wrong direc­tion. However, this hard­ly will have no impact what I use and how I use it. We don’t have Kinko’s/FedEx here so they can put what­ev­er they want in Acrobat.

    Just like pric­ing of their soft­ware in Europe and else­where, you sim­ply have to take a strong stand against it and hope they listen.

  5. UNIV

    I don’t think you get the full scope of JJ, shared resources inter­nal and extre­nal, stylesheet and col­or def­i­n­i­tions with lay­out cre­ation capa­bil­i­ties along with eval­u­a­tion. CS3 has noth­ing close, they only real­ly cov­er the out­put capa­bil­i­ties, 20% of JJ if that.

    Overall speed of the appli­ca­tion is faster and design engine is far bet­ter, just take the trans­paren­cy capa­bil­i­ties, CS3 is still far behind Quark. It’s time to face it, InDesign is in most areas falling back. lay­out spaces, shared con­tent, Job Jackets, Transparency to name but a few. I say Quark has picked up the torch and ran the only thing keep­ing Adobe in the game are it’s mar­ket­ing mega machine and it’s oth­er apps.

  6. Blah

    To a cer­tain point I do under­stand what Job Jackets is try­ing to do, but real­iza­tion is rather awk­ward and not as flu­ent as it could be. There is a ben­e­fit to it and to com­po­si­tion zones in multi-user envi­ron­ment, but I don’t see any ben­e­fit in a single-user envi­ron­ment. Certainly not to extent where this would be huge dis­ad­van­tage as far as effi­cien­cy is concerned.

    I guess I can draw (com­plete­ly wrong?) com­par­i­son between JJ and let’s say a Word tem­plate. I know I’m com­par­ing apples and oranges here. For sake of sim­pli­fy­ing what I mean I’ll draw a com­par­i­son. I know JJ can do far more.

    JJ define what you can/should dur­ing your design process (page size, colours, and oth­er attrib­ut­es), it can be shared as it is an XML file. Great con­cept. You fol­low pre­de­fined rules, it will point out any errors you make in your design process and allow you to cor­rect them. InDesign does not allow this.

    This seems like mak­ing a Word tem­plate as I do for stu­dents for writ­ing research papers. We already know how they look like and the lay­out is, or at least it should be, the same for all stu­dents. I sim­ply do all the work regard­ing lay­out by cre­at­ing a tem­plate. Define run­ning heads, front pages, bib­li­og­ra­phy, titles…only leav­ing them option to use type of table of con­tent they like, while the rest (spac­ing, font, size…) is already pre­for­mat­ted by me. They just type in their research/data in pre­de­fined sec­tions thus retain­ing for­mat­ting. Job Jackets act similar.

    So, com­par­ing Job Jackets and mea­sur­ing the speed of use between soft­ware which has this fea­ture with the one that does not could be flawed. 

    Now, I’m not say­ing this is not allowed or this should not be used as Quark’s advan­tage (which we estab­lished already is), but rather how it’s done.

    Of course, let­ting a stu­dent for­mat their own paper will make them less pro­duc­tive than already using pre­for­mat­ted tem­plate. It’s faster, and they don’t have to won­der how to do it. Same with Job Jackets. If there is some­one who will do all JJ for me as end user and have me only use it when need­ed, will, of course, make my life easier.

    However, this review does not state whether or not the process of cre­at­ing Job Jackets is cal­cu­lat­ed into this fierce com­par­i­son. Using JJ can boost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty tak­ing they’re easy to create/use, but it does­n’t have to be the case either. If it’s com­plex, it can be quite the opposite.

    What and how did exact­ly he mea­sure these advan­tages? Let me go back to Word again. If I have a blank doc­u­ment and need to apply 24pt bold Times New Roman for­mat­ting to my title which will be Heading1, for exam­ple. I can do it faster (once) by sim­ply select­ing that text and apply­ing those attrib­ut­es direct­ly rather than going to styles and cre­at­ing that spe­cif­ic style and apply­ing it. From that stand­point, I would be more pro­duc­tive than a per­son who goes and cre­ates a style for every spe­cif­ic for­mat­ting they’re going to use. However, if I need­ed to change style of all my Heading1 titles, then I’d be in huge dis­ad­van­tage to those who cre­at­ed styles. To them it’ll be 10 sec­ond action, while it would take me.…

    I know that my com­par­i­son is some­what abstract and it should not be tak­en lit­er­al­ly. I’m try­ing to under­stand how exact­ly these results are measured.

    If ID lacks JJ fea­ture and major­i­ty of com­par­isons are relat­ed to it, then it does­n’t take a rock­et sci­en­tist to con­clude with­out tests that it will per­form bet­ter. But, if the review­er com­pared head to head fea­tures which can both do, only in ID he used “longer step” and then he repro­duced the same with Job Jackets in QXP, did he include the time of cre­at­ing those Job Jackets or he sim­ply used pre­de­fined ones and applied them? This would clear­ly put ID in infe­ri­or position.

    I mean, how do you com­pare exact com­po­si­tion zones benefit/saving in single-user envi­ron­ment? Or the same in mul­ti user envi­ron­ment if one lacks the fea­ture? I guess you could sim­ply mea­sure time of ID users exchang­ing files via medi­um X and the time need­ed them for incor­po­rat­ing them. Then again, if you place InDesign in InDesign file and you work on shared com­put­er, oth­er user could change placed ID doc­u­ment. It would reflect changes in doc­u­ment you’re work­ing on. Do note that I don’t know if this is pos­si­ble. I know you can place ID files in CS3, and if you can pos­si­bly share files on your com­put­er and have 2nd user work on that file direct­ly it would reflect changes. So, in a way, it would “sim­u­late com­po­si­tion zones”. Btw. I know that insert­ing ID doc­u­ments has lim­i­ta­tions. I’m won­der­ing if some­thing like this is even possible?

    Also, usage of rel­a­tive val­ues can also be mis­lead­ing. Marketing wise, say­ing you’re 2 sec­onds more pro­duc­tive than in com­pet­ing prod­uct is not the same as using rel­a­tive fig­ure of 18%. It sounds sooo good such mon­ey saver. 18% per hour…per year…woo hoo. Just imag­ine the sav­ings we can achieve. Errr… we all know you can do most of the things dif­fer­ent­ly, some­times do the same thing in 5–6 dif­fer­ent ways One could take short, oth­ers can take longer or be the same. How can you be sure this review­er did not use his hypo­thet­i­cal bet­ter knowl­edge of QXP to ID’s dis­ad­van­tage. Even if you loose 2 sec­onds so many times an hour by repeat­ing same com­mand in ID, there is a way you can prob­a­bly cut down the time you’re doing some­thing by either find­ing anoth­er way, using short­cuts or assign­ing the same to that fre­quent­ly used option.

    As for your com­ment. I beg to dif­fer. While I do agree appli­ca­tion itself is faster and more respon­sive while open­ing and doing things, I have seen quite a lag when work­ing with graph­ics loaded doc­u­ments with lat­est ver­sion. I was told in old­er ver­sion it went smooth. I can­not con­firm any of it, except the lag. But, over­all, yes appli­ca­tion (QXP) is more respon­sive *on my system*.

    Design engine…I wouldn’t know. Knowing how old Quark code is, I’d say oth­er­wise, but I hon­est­ly have no idea. How exact­ly is that the case? Due to fact you can do some minor adjust­ment in Quark for which you have to launch 3rd appli­ca­tion in ID, or because lay­out can be done “better”? How can you con­clude one engine is bet­ter than the other?

    I fail to see what is wrong with ID’s trans­paren­cy fea­ture? It can be applied to the fill, stroke, and text of any sin­gle object. The only thing it lags behind is table trans­paren­cy. Personally, I don’t see it as dis­ad­van­tage that can be labeled as “far behind”. The only time I’d find this use­ful (trans­par­ent tables) is when I use image as a back­ground or when there is noth­ing on the page but image and tab­u­lar data. In oth­er cas­es, I per­son­al­ly would not use it. Not to say fea­ture is not wel­come, but I just don’t have need for it. Certainly not a deal break­er . You are right about oth­er fea­tures, but as they tar­get rather “niche mar­ket”, I would dis­agree with “far behind” statement.

  7. UNIV

    You make some very com­pelling state­ments, but JJ for sin­gle users you miss a key point of shared / syn­chro­nized con­tent this is mas­sive for users, it’s like a dynam­ic library for mul­ti­ple projects and across lay­outs. if images or text change in the resource it can update 100’s of projects, no need to remem­ber to switch out images or update legal text or phone num­bers, man­age the sin­gle JJ.

    Transparency, is col­or based in Quark no object, mas­sive dif­fer­ence this shows how far ahead they are. if you can apply a colour you can apply trans­paren­cy, i.e a dif­fer­ent % for each let­ter in a word in a sin­gle text box, try that in ID.

    The abil­i­ty to change a sin­gle JJ for­mat and have 100’s of doc­u­ments change is some­thing you can not cal­cu­late the sav­ing of, i.e half way through a pro­duc­tion of a major cat­a­logue pro­duc­tion they what to change the font and colours, this is 200 doc­u­ments need chang­ing how long would it take in ID to change the style sheets of 200 files? maybe 30 sec­onds to update the JobJacket that all 200 are using in Quark.

    Single user using mul­ti lay­out spaces must be a great pro­duc­tion ben­e­fit, the abil­i­ty to have all design for­mats in a sin­gle file and have text and images syn­chro­nized across lay­out spaces, shared lay­outs with­in or out­side a project.

    And a state­ment of How Old Quark code is, it’s new­er than ID code, the migra­tion of code to OS X and UB forced Quark to rewrite code and update it. the fact that they sup­port XT devel­op­ment in .net and objec­tive C shows how far they are, native plat­form development. 

    As a user that has to sup­port both and devel­op for both you see the advan­tages and short com­ing of both, and any­one that put’s ID ahead of Quark is real­ly not in touch with both appli­ca­tions, the only way ID is ahead is based on Adobe mar­ket­ing and mis­in­formed users. I was pro ID for sev­er­al years but they are falling back.

  8. Erik Vlietinck

    Registration on IT-Enquirer is now imme­di­ate, and once reg­is­tered, you are tak­en to the home page where the text con­tains a down­load link.

    No con­fir­ma­tion e‑mail nec­es­sary anymore.

  9. UNIV

    Thanks Erik,
    but the pdf is pass­word pro­tect­ed?? no pass­word given??

  10. Samuel John Klein

    I’m going to have to go back and try again. When I orig­i­nal­ly tried reg­is­ter­ing there I nev­er did get the con­fir­ma­tion email.

  11. Peter Villevoye

    Don’t reg­is­ter to that clear­ly biased website…
    It’s also avail­able here (by kind permission)

    The com­par­i­son and results are based on a flawed knowl­edge of InDesign, as imme­di­ate­ly proved by the dis­cus­sion of the first task on page 6.
    It states that the mas­ter text box on the 1st and next pages must be unlocked and linked man­u­al­ly, thus hin­der­ing a quick and prop­er auto­mat­ed gen­er­a­tion of a long tex­tu­al document.
    This is not true.
    By press­ing the shift key while ‘drop­ping’ text into the box (a well-known short­cut, avail­able since PageMaker ver­sion 1) the text will gen­er­ate new pages and flow into these boxes.

    I decid­ed not to take the effort of read­ing any further,
    but to email the author about this seri­ous hia­tus in his brain. Het should make him­self more acquaint­ed with the prod­uct, before pub­lish­ing this kind of nonsense.

  12. Fritz

    In regards to the com­ment about how JJ can be used to update styles in 100 doc­u­ments in a few sec­onds in Quark. 

    Yes, you can do that with Quark, but it can be done just as eas­i­ly with InDesign. Simply cre­ate a book and syn­chro­nize your styles, swatch­es and mas­ter­pages. Try that with with Quark.

  13. UNIV

    BOOKS!! Xpress has books that can syn­chro­nize objects, But those con­cepts are so flawed, as they are strict­ly based on book lay­outs, and using them in any oth­er way is a hack to get what you need done. JJ has the abil­i­ty to syn­chro­nize arcoss books, across mag­a­zines a sin­gle job jack­et can hold all client design ele­ments and styles and use these across media and projects keeps all the clients work in sync.

    Lets see InDesign sup­port mul­ti­ple lay­outs, syn­chro­nize con­tent across pages/layouts and projects, cre­ate documents/layouts on the fly with sytylesheets/colours and shared con­tent ready to use.

  14. UNIV

    Peter odvi­ous­ly can’t come to terms with the fact InDesign does­n’t rule the world or even rev­o­lu­tion­ize DTP. Just the thought of Quark out doing ID just makes him crazy.…

  15. Peter Villevoye

    I’ve had my share of rev­o­lu­tions. I used PageMaker until XPress 3 was around. I did­n’t switch to using and endors­ing InDesign until Quark final­ly unveiled XPress 7. I have very good con­tact with Quark and still give Tim Gill cred­its for hav­ing devel­oped a great app, back in the eight­ies. But they lost me. I choose for progress in large leaps, no small doses.

    I do like syn­chro­nized text and I can’t stand it when InDesign puts text in the top of a ver­ti­cal­ly cen­tered box, just because I switch to round­ed cor­ners. Oh yes, there are var­i­ous ben­e­fits to XPress, and I do know them. Still, I choose for the hun­dreds of advan­tages that InDesign already offers, and dont want to be kept wait­ing again by a com­pa­ny and their ‘pub­lish­ing poo­dles’, who think Quark still needs to rule and rev­o­lu­tion­ize the DTP world.

    Of course, there’s noth­ing wrong with a good com­pe­ti­tion. Everyone is free to choose sides, and I don’t have any­thing against shame­less pro­mo­tion, not even biased one. But untrue state­ments must be neglect­ed and discarded.

  16. UNIV

    Since when did ID make large leaps for­ward??? FrameMaker was the leap, ID has been a crawl. If you talk leaps look at Quark Server, Job Jackets, Synchronized Text, Synchronized pic­tures, Synchronized Boxes, Layout Spaces, Shared lay­outs, Colour Based trans­paren­cy, Interactive lay­outs, supe­ri­or image sup­port. You over look one major fact, Quark is still rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the indus­try, like it or not. Adobe copies and fol­lows. After going to count­less ID sem­i­nars read­ing reports online and see­ing the amount of miss infor­ma­tion spread about Quark 6 and 7 by Adobe and so called indus­try experts and trained pro­fes­sion­als it’s fun­ny to see what hap­pens when ONE minor item is over looked. 

    CS3 is noth­ing new just a few small fea­tures added to 2, and a price tag that cleared my account. It’s always good to see sheep fol­low­ing the Adobe mar­kets machine. It increas­es pro­fes­sion­al con­sul­tant fees. I sup­pose that’s why we are able to cre­ate Quark files on our IPhones and send them to print­ers. Thanks.

  17. Paul Chernoff

    Let me know when QuarkXPress fix­es basic things, such as style sheets and mas­ter pages.

  18. shred

    Let me know when ID fix­es basic things, like mak­ing up fonts that don’t exist with­in a file.

  19. Paul Chernoff

    Hopefully this prob­lem is fixed in CS3. I have encoun­tered the prob­lem you mean in CS2. It hap­pens on copy and paste where InDesign/InCopy assigns the font style from a dif­fer­ent font fam­i­ly. While this is a pain, I see it only a few times a month on hun­dreds of pages and it is easy to fix by doing a Find Font, click on More Info so you can see the print­er font (which is cor­rect) and mak­ing your fix.

    This is a pain and I fault Adobe for not fix­ing this in CS2. However, I found QuarkXPress’s approach to para­grapha and char­ac­ter styles result­ed in design­ers often result­ing to use styles. When we switched to ID I found that our design­ers use styles almost all of the time, part­ly because they work bet­ter and are much eas­i­er to use. I did not see any improve­ments in this area in QXP 7.

  20. UNIV

    So when you say Fix stylesheets and mas­ter pages what do you mean? Do they work, yes, do they meet there des­ig­nat­ed design require­ment, Yes, are you able to apply, change and mod­i­fy with either sin­gle key stroke mouse click or com­bi­na­tion of both, Yes. and do all these func­tions work, Yes.
    So what’s the prob­lem? Your Designers don’t use them.… oooh I see the prob­lem!! not sure Quark could fix that

  21. Paul Chernoff

    As expect­ed, a snot­ty response from UNIV, who seems to believe that any­one who per­fers ID over QXP for any rea­son is an idiot.

    Style sheets: QuarkXPress has a poor Stylesheet design that dis­cour­ages design­ers from user­ing them. To go into more detail:

    1) Style sheets do not inheret from each other.
    2) No easy way to CHANGE a style sheet def­i­n­i­tion based on a man­u­al­ly for­mat­ted text
    3) No way to pre­view a style sheet change before comit­ting to it
    4) In 6.5 no way to undo a style sheet redefinition
    5) When brin­ing in text from anoth­er doc­u­ment with the same style sheet name into a lay­out, the text does not adopt to the lay­out’s style sheet def­i­n­i­tion. It will take the def­i­n­i­tion but then apply the old style sheet def­i­n­i­tions as a man­u­al over­ride. This was a major prob­lem with QPS.
    The items above made style sheets in QXP much less use­full and hard­er to mod­i­fy than in ID. In QXP, if a design­er mod­i­fied a style sheet, when brin­ing in an arti­cle in QPS the arti­cle did not adopt to the new def­i­n­i­tions, requir­ing man­u­al over­rides. And redefin­ing style sheets in QXP involved man­u­al­ly chang­ing a para­graph to see how it looks, and then hav­ing to do those changes again in the style sheet definition.

    Master Pages:
    My biggest com­plaint in QXP is the lack of bas­ing mas­ter pages on oth­er mas­ter pages. This means if we change the folio I need to man­u­al­ly make that change on every sin­gle mas­ter page for the lay­out. In ID we use inher­i­tance so we only need to change that folio on a sin­gle mas­ter page and it flows to all of the oth­er mas­ter pages. Having spent many many hours of my life work­ing on tem­plates, this is a major time saver.

    And I would like to add a note: I have great­ly enjoyed work­ing with peo­ple from Quark before mov­ing to ID. I found them very can­did and will­ing to lis­ten and real­ly want­ed to help us. Some agreed with some of my crit­i­cisms of QXP and thought that they should have been addressed before some of the web fea­tures were added. It was clear at times that they did­n’t agree with some of the deci­sions made high­er up, but they were com­mit­ted to improv­ing Quark and QXP in many ways. I worked with QXP 7 betas and with QXP 7 before we made the deci­sion to move to ID. Since we were a QPS shop the tim­ing seemed poor (we would have to wait for QPS 4 to be released before we could use QXP 7 on the edi­to­r­i­al side) and I fig­ured that would be at least a year. 

    Despite UNIV’s claims of using QPS 4, I still see only QPS Classic 3 list­ed on Quark’s web site (I guess UNIV is using a beta of 4), so this would mean we would have con­tin­ued using QPS 3 and QXP 6.5 on our pub­li­ca­tion, some­thing our design­ers found unacceptable.

    Our design­ers (and edi­tors) have been very hap­py with the switch.

    I hope this detail is use­ful to oth­er read­ers of this site.

  22. Rene Hache

    This is an incred­i­bly flawed study. Those “pro­duc­tiv­i­ty” gains would only be true if the eval­u­a­tors were using InDesign like it was Quark. 

    In the arti­cle, they men­tion how quick­ly you can do draw a text box as being “faster” in Quark. In InDesign, you have to just click the let­ter “T” and drag. Exactly how much quick­er can you get? Until we can con­trol our com­put­ers with our minds, you won’t get quick­er than that!

    Using InDesign with old Quark habits is very com­mon because very few peo­ple take the time to real­ly learn some­thing – and it’s extreme­ly unproductive.

    Everybody could go on all day how Quark is quick­er in some areas, ID in oth­ers. Ultimately, some­one who real­ly knows there tool will always beat some­body who does­n’t. With two experts at the helm, the race would be very close, with ID get­ting the nod the longer the doc­u­ment got, but not by much. 

    I pre­fer InDesign, but I don’t use it like Quark. I find it more pro­duc­tive because it seems to “think” more like I do, and the fea­ture set is def­i­nite­ly stronger for the work I typ­i­cal­ly get. But I would­n’t claim that it’s the only choice. Competition is good for a reason.

    Rene

  23. Peter Villevoye

    There’s a slew of stuff that Quark sim­ply does­n’t touch and of which users think it’s an absolute ben­e­fit to their work­flow. When we need to start a debate on what’s exact­ly a “rev­o­lu­tioairy” fea­ture or just a minor improve­ment to a fea­ture (or the app as a whole), then I think we digress.

    Okay, talk­ing about mas­ter pages, here’s a bone for XPress afi­cionado’s to chew on:

    Many mag­a­zine design­ers like ID Layers because they run ‘through’ the mas­ter page as well, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to have a mas­ter page that has items on top of page items (not just below). Page num­bers, logo’s in cor­ners and oth­er orna­men­tal ele­ments can be posi­tioned on an upper lay­er to let it be imposed on top of let’s say a full page pic­ture or shade that’s on a low­er lay­er and must run under these elements.

    And for sec­onds: why do they need to build anoth­er (unbased) mas­ter page in XPress, when they just need a dif­fer­ent num­ber of col­umn guides on a page ?

  24. Paul Chernoff

    Whoops, a major mis­take on my last post. I wrote:

    1) Style sheets do not inheret from each other.”

    This is wrong. They do. What I meant to write was that with a 3rd par­ty plug-in it is pos­si­ble to redesign stylesheets by exam­ple, but the draw­back was that inhere­tance would not work if you used this plug-in.

    And I for­got to add 

    6) When direct­ing a para­graph style to over­ride man­u­al set­tings, char­ac­ter styles sheets get removed from the paragraph.

    But UNIV missed my major point. In QuarkXPress our design­ers avoid­ed using style sheets because of the lim­i­ta­tions and dif­fi­cul­ties in suing them (they did use them, but not as much as they should have). The supe­ri­or style sheets of ID (both in pow­er and in ease of use) has result­ed in our design­ers using them extensively.

  25. Alistair Dabbs

    I also think some of the IT-Enquirer tests are flawed. For an out­line of where I think the report goes wrong, I’ve list­ed the items quote-by-quote at my blog site (too long to put here). However, I con­grat­u­late Erik on pub­lish­ing the report and his will­ing­ness to make it wide­ly avail­able for free. I don’t agree that there is a delib­er­ate bias; rather, it may be that the report was writ­ten dis­pas­sion­ate­ly by some­one who knows a great deal more about QuarkXPress than InDesign.

  26. Mjenius

    I don’t know why, but this test thing makes me laugh. It’s almost like the lab tests they do for dig­i­tal cam­eras. It may all seem rel­e­vant, but once you get into the semi-pro DSLR’s (and up) they’re pret­ty much dif­fer­ences that nei­ther your eyes nor print­ed image will notice. Yes, Canon may have bet­ter sen­sors and Nikon may have bet­ter proces­sors, and they both have about equal qual­i­ty in lens­es. In the end it comes down to your own skills.

  27. UNIV

    Peter inter­est­ing point on Layers on Master Pages, this was avail­able for many years (v3) with 3rd par­ty XT’s for Quark and only just added to Quark native­ly in the last release, To pauls Comments on inher­i­tance of mas­ter page ele­ments this is also pos­si­ble with Shared Content.

    Stylesheets + Key Commands = result

    I have found most peo­ples issues with Quark are due to the lack of knowl­edge of the appli­ca­tion, peo­ple nev­er got to learn the new fea­tures and enhanced fea­tures when they come­out. the fact that peo­ple find text to box a cool new fea­ture just amazes me, join,union dif­fer­ence on mul­ti box­es fea­tures that have been there from v4, space align, sup­per step repeat..

    But on a lighter note Does ID have aliens that are able to shoot box­es? Does ID have RPG wheedling aliens blow­ing up boxes?

    When ID have the abil­i­ty to have aliens blowup Quark logos on my ID page is the day I throw my Quark Box out the window

  28. Mingo Tanaka

    UNIV, I think you’re mis­tak­en on a num­ber of points regard­ing InDesign. 

    Not argu­ing with your pref­er­ence for XPress, but your enthu­si­asm for it is mak­ing you say some sil­ly things…like InDesign has­n’t inno­vat­ed, and that Quark’s trans­paren­cy tech­nol­o­gy is is supe­ri­or. Both state­ments are false, I think. That said, I would­n’t argue with your pref­er­ence for Quark’s color-based imple­men­ta­tion (it does­n’t real­ly thrill me, but to each his own), but the actu­al tech­nol­o­gy is anoth­er matter.

    There are many things to argue with in your posts, but not your enthu­si­asm for many of XPress 7’s fea­tures. It’s def­i­nite­ly the best ver­son of XPress there’s ever been, but I still pre­fer ID for a whole host of reasons.

    A few points: to say that ID has­n’t inno­vat­ed is absurd. If any­thing you ought to at least thank Adobe for mak­ing Quark act like they care again.

    Firsts for ID:

    Transparency in a lay­out app. Quark has played catch up. And although XPress has a cou­ple nice shad­ow fea­tures that ID does not, I’ll take ID’s object based imple­men­ta­tion and core tech­nol­o­gy any day. In addi­tion to all the new effects in CS3 that are not in XPress, ID has always enabled the appli­ca­tion of blend modes to native and import­ed objects that Quark does not.

    And yes, being able to apply an opac­i­ty effect to a type selec­tion is cool, but I nev­er need to do that…if I ever do, I’ll con­vert some text out­lines and do it that way. What I’ve actu­al­ly need­ed to do, how­ev­er, is apply sep­a­rate stroke and fill col­ors to type, as well as gra­di­ents, and ID lets me do that with live type. In XPress you’d have to con­vert to out­lines. So each app needs its workarounds depend­ing what you need to do.

    It’s flat­ten­er is far more sophis­ti­cat­ed than that of XPress, mar­ket­ing hype notwith­stand­ing. It also enables you to pre­view the effects of your flat­ten­ing set­tings as well as your sep­a­ra­tions. XPress does neither.

    Even more impor­tant­ly, how­ev­er, in the con­text of trans­paren­cy work­flows, ID enables the native export of non-flattened, device inde­pen­dent PDF. This is huge, espe­cial­ly in light of the Adobe PDF RIP tech­nol­o­gy that has hit the mar­ket. An unflat­tened PDF with live trans­paren­cy is both device inde­pen­dent and editable, two big work­flow and qual­i­ty advan­tages. It also enables you to import all ver­sions of unflat­tened PDF, and does no vio­lence to those files in the process, unlike XPress.

    The tech­no­log­i­cal basis for this is that ID, like Acrobat and Illustrator, I believe, uses a dis­play PDF imag­ing mod­el that’s much more robust than PostScript and/or what the Mac and Windows OS cur­rent­ly offer. It’s pret­ty clear to me that Quark is using the OS tech­nol­o­gy to doe what it’s doing.

    Say what you want about Quark’s code base (it’s not a re-architected app…the old code base is being updat­ed in a piece-meal way I’ll bet), it has noth­ing like what Adobe is using for their own inter­nal dis­play and out­put engines.

    Other firsts:

    para­graph composition
    opti­cal mar­gin alignment
    frame grids
    Unicode/OpenType support
    native PSD, AI, and PDF import
    bleed and slug as actu­al doc­u­ment properties
    Interactive PDF authoring
    Preview mode
    Editable key­board shortcuts
    unlim­it­ed undoes
    over­print preview
    Quickapply
    nest­ed styles
    nest­ed frames

    I could go on, but there’s no need. XPress 7 is a good prod­uct, but to say that ID has­n’t inno­vat­ed or is play­ing catch-up to XPress isn’t real­ly a cred­i­ble claim, IMHO.

    JJ’s in XPress, as well as com­po­si­tion zones, are, IMHO, imple­ment­ed in unwieldy and awk­ward ways. The for­mer is a bas­tardiza­tion of the JDF stan­dard that puts the bur­den inap­pro­pri­ate­ly on a design­er, IMHO, and it’s not some­thing I would choose to use. I pre­fer send­ing an unflat­tened PDF to Acrobat if I’m going to use a JDF workflow.

    I also pre­fer ID’s place­able INDD files to com­po­si­tion zones, sim­ply because the for­mer is much sim­pler to use and arguably more pow­er­ful. It does­n’t impose a work­flow on me, and some of ID’s oth­er fea­tures make it more reli­able for my work.

    The IT Enquirer piece is a pret­ty poor piece of work giv­en the num­ber of fac­tu­al errors. It betrays both igno­rance and bias that’s unfor­tu­nate in what’s sup­posed to be an even-handed and fair analysis.

    Oh, and InDesign DOES have an alien, but it’s in the print dia­log. You can hang onto your box.

  29. rm

    Stunning report if you think about it really.

    InDesign is NOT a pro­fes­sion­al pre­press progam. Quark is best if you want to meet a deadline.

    Why would any­one choose to be less pro­duc­tive in the long run?

  30. Peter Villevoye

    Indeed UNIV, the recent­ly bun­dled exten­sion does bet­ter Master/Layer stuff – final­ly. Excuse me for not wait­ing 5 years or fork­ing out mon­ey before, while ID was offer­ing this since ver­sion 1…

    Maybe it’s good to ask you how nifty fea­tures like Adobe multi-line com­pos­er, view­ing the H&J vio­la­tions (Composition) and font-conflicts (pre­vent­ing, report­ing and show­ing them cor­rect­ly, while I’m grace­ful­ly allowed to use sim­ple short­cuts for Bold and Italic) are han­dled in XPress – we might learn from it…

  31. Peter T

    This has been an enter­tain­ing thread to read. I have to give Quark props for even get­ting this far back into the bat­tle after the years of drub­bing. It does feel to me like Adobe’s a bit more of a fol­low­er at this point…trying to milk past suc­cess­es and boost share­hold­er val­ue while Quark seems much more hooked up to the pulse of the iPhone gen­er­a­tion. To me Layout Spaces, Composition Zones, Job Jackets, Synchronized Content, Color-based trans­paren­cy, non-destructive image edit­ing and more, not to men­tion intense num­bers of pow­er­ful XTensions…makes ID look long in the tooth…yesteryear’s news just became today’s old hat and the ID drones are the new PageMaker users (we used to be amused by).

  32. Not

    I beg to dif­fer. If QuarkXPress was 79% more pro­duc­tive, don’t you believe the com­pa­nies who moved to it would­n’t have fig­ured it out them­selves? I doubt they just wake up one day and say, we’ll switch to ID. Some tests and cost analy­sis must be made. It’s wrong to assume they just migrat­ed because ID license is cheap­er. License cost is a fixed cost. They would gain lit­tle in sav­ings by buy­ing ID while hav­ing QXP not 7 or 9% but 79% more pro­duc­tive. You pay license once (per ver­sion) and you do thou­sands of projects by the time you “have to” pur­chase new ver­sion. Having 79% more pro­duc­tive appli­ca­tion will save you ton of mon­ey and will cov­er 100 fold the cost of pay­ing pre­mi­um for using QXP. I doubt any­one nor­mal would dis­miss that fact. The prob­lem for Quark is not tak­ing over ID, but rather force cus­tomers to upgrade to 7. Most com­pa­nies still use v4 and that’s prob­lem for Quark. No new rev­enue streams. And those who choose to upgrade, they prob­a­bly upgrade/switch to ID rather than QXP7. I doubt they just do it for mar­ket­ing rea­sons. Some analy­sis must be done before tak­ing that step.

    This review besides being clear­ly an noto­ri­ous­ly biased has some rather false points. He admits he does­n’t know and has­n’t test­ed some things, and he bases his mea­sure­ments on some guy’s OPINION because he TRUSTS him. How exact­ly do you quan­ti­fy opin­ion? Not to men­tion the fact he com­pared Beta ver­sion to some­thing that was on the mar­ket for two years and received con­stant upgrades. Even those famous XTensions that were made free was only to fill the gap of basic fea­tures that missed in QXP. I can’t believe you had to pay for XTension to do some basic stuff.

    It’s also inter­est­ing how “all-in-one” approach is so much preached and how ID and CS is con­tent­ly bashed. Quark makes one damn prod­uct and every­thing else is just plain exten­sion for QXP. How is it that QXP can make SWF files but ID can’t. Disregarding that you have to pur­chase anoth­er pro­gram to have that func­tion­al­i­ty. Why is it QuarkXPress is reviewed with every­thing avail­able from Quark while ID is reviewed bare­bones dis­re­gard­ing what oth­er appli­ca­tions from CS can do. Quark has to imple­ment all those fea­tures in QuarkXPress itself because it has no oth­er prod­ucts. What, it will offer Photoshop alter­na­tive that only does 2–3 things? Of course not! It will inte­grate those 2–3 things because they have to, not because they think it’s bet­ter approach. Adobe can’t make Illustrator/Photoshop/ID hybrid because not every design­er under the sun uses ID. Those appli­ca­tions have dif­fer­ent user base and not every pho­tog­ra­ph­er cares about ID…not to men­tion web developers.

    It’s just sil­ly to com­pare QXP+QID with ID. Compare both appli­ca­tions out of the box and that’s it. No exten­sions no stuff. It’s false to load one appli­ca­tion with exten­sions (even if they’re free, they are NOT shipped with prod­uct) and oth­er offer­ing from Quark and com­pare bare­bones ID. Quark can’t touch any­thing in Adobe’s CS with it’s offer­ings so nat­u­ral­ly it calls it bloat­ed and all-in-one approach QXP offers (which has to) is bet­ter. I don’t want to edit my pho­tographs in ID nor do I want to make illus­tra­tions in ID or web pages or flash con­tent. Better prod­uct for those things exist which are more effi­cient. The only thing Adobe needs to work on is mak­ing switch from one appli­ca­tion more seam­less so you can edit native files across appli­ca­tions and do some basic things in non-native appli­ca­tion. Just because I can’t do some vec­tor things in ID and I can in QXP does­n’t mean it’s deal break­er. QXP or ID will nev­er pro­vide felx­i­bilty or pow­er of Illustrator..so why even brag about it. I am more inter­est­ed in progress they make towards in formatting/importing/exporting.

    While col­lab­o­ra­tion fea­tures of QXP is at the moment bet­ter, it will not save you much time if it’s too com­plex to use or incon­ve­nient. In the end, how many of you guys col­lab­o­rate on dai­ly basis and actu­al­ly use those fea­tures? Not that it’s bad thing to have, on con­trary, but brag­ging about some­thing that is used rarely is just sil­ly. Sure it’s a plus, but I would­n’t mind peo­ple bitch­ing about ID miss­ing some­thing cru­cial or real time saver that ALL can ben­e­fit from and not some­thing I have no use for as do 90% of users. It cer­tain­ly could­n’t save me 79% time when work­ing on a project.

  33. Peter T

    Oops..I think you are slight­ly con­fused. InDesign is lit­er­al­ly a “bag of plug-ins”. Look in the InDesign plug-ins fold­er some time and what do you see? Only every sin­gle func­tion of InDesign. So when Quark offers XPertTools Pro for free (because the own it), you can’t say that’s out­side the core offer­ing just because it’s dis­trib­uted a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. It is the core offering.

    You need to real­ize also the 79% is not in all areas of com­par­i­son but in some sig­nif­i­cant ones. Also, when com­pa­nies switched to InDesign, Quark did­n’t even have an OSX offer­ing. And Quark con­tin­ued to lose mar­ket share just like the Beatles lost mar­ket share to the Monkees. But the Beatles of Desktop pub­lish­ing are back with a new album and it’s pret­ty darn impressive.

    Collaboration IS the way of the FUTURE, whether you are there or not and Quark is already work­ing on much more advanced col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nol­o­gy for ver­sion 8. It’s like par­al­lel proces­sors vs. lin­ear. If two peo­ple can work on a 60 page mono­graph at the same time it gets done 2 times faster (=100% boost over ID)…if three peo­ple then its 200% boost in effi­cien­cy. Pure logic…don’t get angry at Quark for invent­ing a bet­ter way to have real TEAMWORK.

    I think the trans­paren­cy in Quark is so much sweet­er too. Try select­ing one let­ter in ID, give it its own col­or and opac­i­ty while not effect­ing the oth­er type in the box. How about putting a runaround or a skew on the drow shadow?

  34. TomG

    Both pieces of soft­ware pro­vide meth­ods to cre­ate JDF (job def­i­n­i­tion for­mat) tagged files. Adobe, help­ing devel­op this stan­dard, is in the fore­front of JDF sup­port. JDF is the future. For those of you who don’t know what JDF is, you should look into it. 

    InDesign Server CS3 (even CS2) offers group col­lab­o­ra­tion and group design pos­si­bil­i­ties (through third par­ty soft­ware) beyond any­thing Quark will EVER be able to cre­ate. Ever heard of SoftCare’s K4 pub­lish­ing system?

  35. Peter T

    You’ve got to be kidding…JDF was devel­oped in Europe..by CIP4

    The International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress Organization (CIP4) is a not-for-profit asso­ci­a­tion and is reg­is­tered with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission as a Standards Development Organization. CIP4 is estab­lished in Switzerland, it has no reg­u­lar offices; rather is a glob­al orga­ni­za­tion with rep­re­sen­ta­tives in sev­er­al coun­tries. CIP4 brings togeth­er ven­dors, con­sul­tants and end-users in the print com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Graphic Arts indus­try, and asso­ci­at­ed sec­tors, cov­er­ing a vari­ety of equip­ment, soft­ware, periph­er­als, and process­es. Members par­tic­i­pate in focused work­ing groups to define future ver­sions of Job Definition Format (JDF), to study user require­ments, and to design a JDF Software Development Kit (SDK). Currently the CIP4 Organization has 310 members.”

    Alas, Adobe is but 1 member.

    Quark’s JobJackets are much more than JDF files…they are active tech­nol­o­gy for enforc­ing and updat­ing doc­u­ments to con­form to specifications…like FlightCheck on steroids.

    As for InDesign server…it is some­what of a joke in com­par­i­son to the multi-threaded, indus­tri­al strength QuarkXPress Server (has a 6 year lead on it) which can ren­der hun­dreds of doc­u­ments simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and com­par­ing a serv­er tech to a desk­top tech is lame also.

    If you want to go there then you need to learn about QPS (Quark Publishing System) which is the defac­to leader and has been since the mid nineties in edi­to­r­i­al work­flow collaboration…putting any Adobe-based offer­ing to shame. It’s one rea­son the Quark DESKTOP appli­ca­tion rocks the col­lab­o­ra­tion so much hard­er than ID…

  36. Not

    I’m not angry at any­thing. :)) The more both can come up with will only ben­e­fit us all. You are con­fus­ing what I’m say­ing. All Adobe appli­ca­tion con­sist of plu­g­ins. That’s not the point. It’s that prod­ucts itself act like a plu­g­in. It’s like hav­ing to install Photoshop to do thing X in InDesign. The only rea­son why Quark offered that plu­g­in for free is that it con­sists of very basic and cru­cial actions you use dai­ly. I am not say­ing it should­n’t be used. It is irrel­e­vant that both use plu­g­in architecutre, many appli­ca­tions do. You can’t real­ly say Maya with Pixar Renderman does bet­ter and pro­duces more real­is­tic graph­ics than let’s say 3ds Max with built in men­tal ray. It’s the fact that you should com­pare how both do with same ren­der­er instead of com­par­ing prod­uct strength­ened with feature/plugin that does­n’t come out of the box.

    When Quark imple­ments those as out of box fea­ture, then ok, but until it does­n’t you should­n’t be com­par­ing it to bare­bone ID if you real­ly want to give pros and cons. Also, QID costs mon­ey and acts like plu­g­in (that’s what I’m say­ing), while many ignore that you can do a lot and more in Flash which is also sep­a­rate pro­gram, but unfor­tu­nate­ly does not act like ID plu­g­in. Yet, every­one prais­es “QXP’s” abil­i­ty to pro­duce Flash con­tent and tak­ing it against ID.

    It is future and Quark is work­ing on it. I agree, but who’s to say CS4 won’t have same fea­tures? I am cer­tain Adobe works on these things for years now as well. They write code in an after­noon as well. I’m sure they do mar­ket research what to imple­ment in their soft­ware. They lis­ten what they cus­tomers NEED and do it. I’m sure if col­lab­o­ra­tion in ID is real­ly THAT bad and cus­tomers require it, they will imple­ment it. But for now, that too hyped fea­ture is not as crucial.

    Yes, he reviewed it. But also skewed results. It’s not that hard to test areas one appli­ca­tion is stronger in. I do know Quark is good and has some fea­tures ID does­n’t, but ID also has its fea­tures which sur­pass Quark. Yet, only a cou­ple of them are includ­ed in test (tables and PDF export).

    Transparency is great, but how many times do you actu­al­ly make one let­ter in a word trans­par­ent in your projects? It is time saver and can be applied on any object, a huge plus for QXP I agree, but if it’s not used often then pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gain in real world won’t be nowhere that high. Who’s to say that most peo­ple can’t do those things just as easy and fast in Photoshop and Illustrator and import in ID.

    It’d be bet­ter to com­pare pro­gram to pro­gram and their main fea­tures. Quark users laugh and put down ID for hav­ing Photoshop effects, which QXP lacks, and say when you need those you use Photoshop instead not QXP. Who’s to say that I won’t pre­fer to use some­thing else instead of drop shad­ow and skew in QXP? If I use those fea­tures often are cru­cial to me, I can make a script to auto­mate things any­way. The beau­ty of ID (don’t know about QXP) that you can do many things sev­er­al ways. It’s up to you to do it the way you like it.

    Personally, those aren’t big deal to me. I don’t make things transparent…it looks cool, but for read­er it’s pain. Less fan­cy effects the bet­ter. That’s just me.

  37. Peter T

    Quark = a fun­da­men­tal build­ing block of the Universe
    Adobe = a mud build­ing block

    I would­n’t be so con­fi­dent in diss­ing Quark in the long run…you nev­er know what forces in the Cosmos may be on their side. 100 years from now it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble they’ll be say­ing “Adobe who?” oh yes they were replaced by open source in 2011.

    What kind of name is “InDesign” and who came up with it? It seems tru­ly ridicu­lous to me but I guess I’m not “In.”

  38. Not

    I for­got. You’re not cor­rect that only gain ID had was only when Quark did not have OSX com­pat­i­ble ver­sion. Many com­pa­nies don’t upgrade to newest and finest right away so that can’t be the only rea­son they switched to ID. The com­pa­nies which still use old­er ver­sions of QXP are most like­ly going to replace it with ID rather than upgrad­ing to 7.

  39. Not

    LOL! Bashing prod­uct based on it’s name its redi­cilous. I don’t like when ID users do that to Quark nor do I like it vice ver­sa. Open source? I don’t think so. It was­n’t able to replace Windows or MS Office and I don’t see it replac­ing ANY of Adobe’s appli­ca­tions any­time soon. It’s a good thing, but let’s be reasonable.

  40. Not

    its name and oth­er errors. Sorry. Thinking one thing typ­ing other.

  41. Peter T

    I’m actu­al­ly not bash­ing InDesign…it and Adobe are great things…I mean it..absolutely mar­volous and wel­come addi­tions to my world…they’re just not with­out peers and in fact if seen from some angles they are both lack­ing and laughable…I enjoy pok­ing some fun back at the Mud Brick crowd who have so glee­ful­ly pound­ed Quark for sev­er­al years. BTW: I hap­pen to love Adobe hous­es too, espe­cial­ly in New Mexico. 

    Names are impor­tant and car­ry weight whether you admit it or not.

  42. Not

    Name is impor­tant, of course. But to me irrel­e­vant when it comes to pro­gram. I just want it to do its work and I don’t care about the name. Not being native English speak­er, to me Quark, as a word, sounds fun­ny – I know it’s relat­ed to physics. When prou­nounced, it sounds way strange. While I don’t see any­thing wrong with name Adobe (named after riv­er as I recall?) or InDesign. ID sounds rather nice. But this is sole­ly my view. It has noth­ing to do with Quark or Adobe. Just want prod­ucts, don’t care how they call them. As long as names are short and sim­ple or can be shortened.

  43. Samuel John Klein

    Your obser­va­tions about Quark are apt. The leg­end has it that the founders of Quark named it such because quarks are the basic build­ing blocks of mat­ter, and they want­ed Quark’s soft­ware to be the basis of DTP and elec­tron­ic layout.

    Even more amus­ing is what Germans call their spe­cial, home-grown cream-cheese–quark, which is prop­er­ly pro­nounced “kuh­vahrk” (or at least as close as I can get in a com­ment), a fact which has been long acknowl­edged by Quark in the glos­sary to its user guide.

    Let it nev­er be said that Quark does­n’t have a sense of humor about things.

  44. nk

    Yeh? And where did physi­cists get the name “Quark” from? From James Joyce’s 1939 nov­el, Finnegan’s Wake. “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
    James Joyce= OLD LITERATURE, and Quark=OLD LITERATURE!!!

    I had a look at IT Enquirer’s half-hearted “apol­o­gy” for the errors in their report. The whole com­ment regard­ing the fact that the 2 pro­grams pro­duce dif­fer­ent CMYK val­ues when con­vert­ing from spot col­ors is tru­ly pathet­ic. Anyone with any print­ing expe­ri­ence any­way knows that the final appear­ance of any print­ed item rests on the shoul­ders of the press man, and not just on the dig­i­tal file (these guys will—or should—always adjust the ink den­si­ties for the var­i­ous col­ors in order to pro­duce the best look­ing print). The upshot of this is that the CMYK val­ues that the soft­ware pro­duces are not nec­es­sar­i­ly the same as those in the fin­ished prod­uct that rolls off the presses.

    In any case, who the hell can say that Quark’s CMYK col­ors are “more accu­rate” than Adobe’s? Sounds to me like these guys are anoth­er bunch of Quark whores, turn­ing tricks on the streets of the pub­lish­ing world.

  45. Peter T

    Yes, pro­ton, elec­tron and oth­er such names are also so old…almost 120 years old! The only dif­fer­ence is those words along with Quark have been cho­sen to rep­re­sent things which have been around since the Big Bang…REALLY SO OLD…just like the air you breathe.…sorry.

    Adobe, the word is even old­er and Spanish but it still means Mud Brick.

    Anybody who knows col­or knows CMYK is an arti­fi­cial col­or­space with no rela­tion to real­i­ty (pri­ma­ry col­ors) and thus sus­cept­able to “Color Management” and interpretation.

  46. nk

    Uh, CMYK has no rela­tion to real­i­ty?! Better tell my local print­er to get rid of his Heidelberg press—apparently, it’s a fig­ment of his imagination…

    Actually, C, M, and Y are the pri­ma­ry col­ors of pig­ment, bucko. CMYK=process col­or, in which col­or space the vast major­i­ty of all print­ed items in the world are produced.

    Listen: stop hold­ing gran­ma Quark’s hand, and come out and play with the cool kids—get wise to InDesign.

  47. Peter T

    Whatever…you must just love talk­ing to your­self and telling every­body what they already know Mr. Nuveau PageMaker (aka InDesign) user. CMY are pri­ma­ry pig­ments but the amount of “K” that you put in is sub­ject to lots of “inter­pre­ta­tion” because you have to pull out the “right” amount of CM&Y at the same time. The eye is the final judge and it sees in RGB last time I checked on God’s lit­tle Rods and Cones system…so CMYK is mankind’s way of print­ing because in the­o­ry 100% C+M+Y = black but it just does­n’t work that way. On you mon­i­tor and in your eyes, 0% R+G+B does = black

    Quark is here to stay…sorry it both­ers you so much. InDesign was last one to the party…but he who laughs last, laughs best. 

    Also, Adobe’s Postscript patent is expired so that’s not an issue and Microsoft has a PDF killer in the works, rumor has it.

    FYI: China and India aren’t real­ly into Adobe’s pro­pri­etary for­mats and will be seek­ing open source and glob­al open stan­dards as their long-term doc­u­ment solu­tions so don’t bet on Flash and PDF even being rel­e­vant 10 years from now.

  48. Not

    Thanks Samuel on that. I was­n’t aware a type of cheese was also called quark. :)) That’s interesting.

    Well, Quark can inter­pret it how­ev­er they want. I like it when com­pa­ny has a sense of humour. It’s a good thing.

    Peter, every­one wants open source for­mats. It’s not just China and India. Open source is hyped so much these days. It does­n’t mat­ter. PDF is set to become ISO cer­ti­fied and it’s free to imple­ment, unless you’re Microsoft. :)) I don’t care about it. It’s just hype. PDF will not van­ish over night nor will Flash. Adobe’s mul­ti bil­lion cor­po­ra­tion and has funds to inno­vate. Even if your pre­dic­tion turn out to be true (and 99.9% wont be the case), who’s to say a tech­nol­o­gy Adobe devolves won’t replace cur­rent for­mats? The for­mats that were devloped 20 or so years ago are still strong so I don’t see any rea­son why either PDF or Flash would be dead in 10. Things don’t change that quickly.

    Besides, who says Quark won’t be around. Let’s hope it does stay. The recent push from Quark – mak­ing XTensions free, low­er cost of soft­ware, free man­u­al, edu­ca­tion license changes…are just say­ing they are adapt­ing. Slowly, but they are. I doubt they’re doing it because they want to make things right and hate charg­ing cus­tomers for man­u­als and stuff…it’s because they feel the heat and Adobe hit them where it hurts the most – stu­dents. I’m glad they’re doing some­thing about it. I hope they release great­est ever v8 which blows ID away. It will only make Adobe inno­vate more and force them to give more back to its cus­tomers. Competition is healthy thing. I just don’t like low shots myself. I don’t mind one going against oth­er on forums or in com­ments on the sites, but I cer­tain­ly dis­like when there’s open attack from offi­cial source bash­ing the com­peti­tor. It makes one look very unpro­fes­sion­al. That’s just me.

    Microsoft replac­ing PDF…maybe one day. As Windows user, I cer­tain­ly would­n’t mind hav­ing it in Windows with­out buy­ing addi­tion­al soft­ware. But … Adobe won’t give up eas­i­ly. Microsoft gets sued all the time and tak­ing that DTP indus­try uses Mac plat­form as a standard…switch won’t either be fast nor pleas­ant. Adobe’s so far ahead with Acrobat. Microsoft will have to put in years and years of devel­op­ment after ship­ping first ver­sion of their for­mat to catch up with it. And know­ing how slow DTP indus­try is to adapt (most are still on Quark 4 and sys­tems that were out in mid 90s) I don’t see Adobe going away any­time soon.

  49. nk

    Ja, Peter T. I spoke to China and India the oth­er day, and they said Adobe is OK.

    But, seri­ous­ly: I think we can bury the Adobe vs Quark hatch­et for a few moments and agree on one thing: just about every­one in the cre­ative indus­try has NO love for Microsoft. And no won­der, their prod­ucts have con­sis­tent­ly been junk—Mac OS dumps on Windows from such a dizzy­ing height that I get ver­ti­go just think­ing about it… and Publisher? There’s a dog of a pro­gram for you! And could some­body explain to me why MS Word takes up more RAM on start­up than Photoshop?

    In any case, I don’t see how they would estab­lish a new doc­u­ment for­mat with­out also launch­ing imag­ing and pub­lish­ing soft­ware at the same time. How would they force cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, who are using Adobe CS and Quark, to pub­lish their doc­u­ments to an MS for­mat? What’s more is that every impo­si­tion­ing sys­tem I’ve come across uses PDF to do its mag­ic with; are print­ers going to spend thou­sands of dol­lars for new hard­ware and soft­ware, just because Billiam Gates says so? I think not. 

    Anyway, Microsoft has said that NONE of the projects that they have in the pipeline are intend­ed to com­pete with Adobe, so put your pants back on, Peter T.

  50. Mjenius

    LOL, Yup Microsoft is in same cor­ner as Kinko’s as far as I’m con­cerned. Frontpage and Publisher was­n’t going to con­vert any­one. Although it was­n’t made for the cre­ative pro. I do think that Quark will remain strong and so will Adobe. I would­n’t be sur­prised if in the next release Quark will have fur­ther improve­ments than Indesign. Quark as a whole is sole­ly depen­dent on one prod­uct while Adobe’s focus is more on the total design­er + devel­op­er. You can already see that Quark is start­ing to take the “Swiss Army” knife approach. I’m sure they will keep improv­ing those fea­tures. Who knows maybe one day Quark users won’t need pho­to­shop, illus­tra­tor, dreamweaver or flash (eh, what the heck let’s throw in pre­mière, after effects and cold­fu­sion too). But will it be wise for tomor­row’s design­ers to stay away from those pro­grams? That might end up being career sui­cide. Now speak­ing of for­mats, Can we please let JPEG die and more on to PNG?

  51. Mjenius

    *move

    sor­ry for the typo. I don’t proof read, guess I could be a 21st cen­tu­ry journalist.

  52. Not

    LOL! Don’t wor­ry about typos. I per­son­al­ly hard­ly notice those. It’d be fun to see QXP on steroids. Throw in Dreamweaver in as well.

    Adobe’s main prod­uct is Photoshop any­way. That’s what dri­ves their rev­enues and that’s when stock prices goes up (new ver­sion released). At least it was like that for year. It’s been replaced with CS, but still…everyone knows which appli­ca­tions have priority.

    JPEG…naw. It has it’s purpose. :)

  53. Peter Villevoye

    Well, one week away from this thread, and it turned into a com­plete holis­tic kalei­do­scope of all DTP facets. Okay, I also tossed the ball in a gen­er­al direc­tion a few times, but I don’t see any more use­ful com­ments on the report’s flawed (or not) basis.

    Meanwhile, I’ve learned to use InDesign serv­er togeth­er with the Adobe CS apps to dri­ve a Xerox iGen, a high-volume full-color POD print­er. And it’s big fun ! With a bunch of spe­cial Xerox plug-ins, this machine real­ly rocks ! And it would be too dif­fi­cult to merge that kind of cre­ativ­i­ty and data in XPress, since these plug-ins ben­e­fit from the suite as a whole.

    Creativity meets col­lab­o­ra­tion, inte­gra­tion and sheer production.

  54. nk

    Sounds pret­ty cool… you hold­ing your breath for Microsoft Xdocs? LOL

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