Quark Deals for Designers of Tomorrow, While Price-Gouging Designers of Today

16 thoughts on “Quark Deals for Designers of Tomorrow, While Price-Gouging Designers of Today”

1. 

   Samuel 8 July 2005

   I went through the above arti­cle, well the feel­ing that I got is that Pariah, Jeff and Samuel you all are doing the Bill Troop act for Adobe. Well you all went up and crit­i­cized his pro Quark instance, I don’t know what should I say for you all. Well I have got Xpress v7 pre-release and I am doing analy­sis, soon I will come up with fair (and I mean it) com­par­i­sion between IndesignCS and V7. I request you all to see the oth­er side of the coin too.

2. 

   Jeff 8 July 2005

   Pariah called Quark 7 “unsexy, but strong” in a head­line pre­view­ing Quark 7. That’s not an anti-Quark remark. You obvi­ous­ly have a hard time hear­ing neg­a­tive press about Quark, but that does­n’t give you the right to ques­tion any­one’s objec­tiv­i­ty (espe­cial­ly those of us who haven’t post­ed very often). It’s insult­ing – at least to me – to be com­pared to a hack like Bill Troop.

   The fact of the mat­ter here is that, whether you like it or not, Pariah rais­es two valid points (one in favor of Quark and one not). Quark has been finan­cial­ly goug­ing users who need to work in mul­ti­ple lan­guages (mean­ing the major­i­ty of the rest of the world) with XPress Passport for years, typ­i­cal of their arro­gance. It was, how­ev­er, a wise move to get into the edu­ca­tion mar­ket. I’ve only been out of school for a year. The major­i­ty of my class­mates pre­fer InDesign because we don’t have the years invest­ed in Quark that our more expe­ri­enced coun­ter­parts have. Both com­pa­nies I interned with and my cur­rent employ­er switched to InDesign (based in part on dis­cus­sions I was a part of because I had exten­sive expe­ri­ence with the pro­gram), and none of the 3 have so much as peeked over their shoul­der since. Quark is wise to go after new users. Whether or not it will be enough to help them remains to be seen.

   If you’re going to com­pare InDesign to Quark, the only rel­e­vant com­par­i­son is with InDesign CS2 (30-day, FULLY FUNCTIONAL tri­al down­load now avail­able). InDesign CS is irrel­e­vant lega­cy soft­ware. Bill Troop’s biggest mis­take was to com­pare Quark 7 (soft­ware with no con­crete release date) with an unnamed but OBVIOUSLY lega­cy ver­sion of InDesign (he tout­ed fea­tures that were avail­able in CS2 as exclu­sive to Quark) – irrel­e­vant, con­sid­er­ing CS2 had been announced over a month pri­or. Don’t make the same mis­take he did.

   Analyze to your heart’s con­tent, but InDesign CS is irrel­e­vant. I have CS2, and it just paid for itself hand-over-fist with a very mas­sive project I had to do over the hol­i­day week­end. Even my slight­ly skep­ti­cal Creative Director said we would nev­er have got­ten a doc­u­ment as impres­sive in the time we had out of Quark.

   Can you release any details about this pre­re­lease you have? I’d be very sur­prised if you did­n’t have to sign an NDA as part of the test­ing process. If you expect any­one oth­er than Quark fun­da­men­tal­ists to take you seri­ous­ly, you’re going to have to pro­vide some­thing more than a “trust me, I’ve seen it and it’s great” or rehash of already-announced fea­tures. You’re also going to have to com­pare it to InDesign’s cur­rent release. I don’t see how you’re analy­sis is rel­e­vant otherwise.

   If you like Quark bet­ter, just say so. You cer­tain­ly don’t have to jus­ti­fy your deci­sion to me or any­one else. I’m just dis­cussing this for the sake of dis­cus­sion. And for every­one’s sake, let Bill Troop go. Nothing he’s said will ever win you any points.

3. 

   Samuel John Klein 12 July 2005

   I’ve want­ed to fol­low up to this, but real­ly, Jeff said it bet­ter than even I could.

   Jeff, you “get” what we’re try­ing to do here. Samuel, to be blunt, you don’t. 

   Still, I’d wel­come some informed com­men­tary and infor­ma­tion on what XPress 7 can and will do for the lay­out artist. I’m eager to see what­ev­er you have, and await what­ev­er it is you have to say about V7 with great interest.

4. 

   Samuel 15 July 2005

   Well guys, I worked real­ly hard to see what v7 has in offer for us, I can’t dis­close the actu­al fea­ture set of v7 because I am bound not to do that. Well I com­pared fea­tures of both, and assigned cer­tain marks to both the soft­wares, this was real­ly a very exhaus­tive com­par­i­sion. In the end out of total 120 marks, InCs got 63 and V7 got 96. InCS lagged behind since it has some fea­tures miss­ing which V7 has in offer­ing. For me hold­ing the breath has wroked well, and I think v7 will make many users hap­py. Well I am dieing to dis­close some of its killing features,but I am bound. Well For Jeff and Sameul, I can bet that this v7 will make you think. Whatever I have writ­ten here, I stand by it.

   I have gone through Jeff’s last com­ment and will come up with an answer because I could­n’t find time to answer it.If you real­ly beleive in debat­ing mer­its of a soft­ware then I hope you for sure will find more mer­its that demer­its in v7. Well let me tell you that I am not pro Quark and Anti Adobe, infact I also planned to shift to Indesign but V7’s announced fea­ture set real­ly impressed me, thats why I just stopped. And now I can say that this stop was real­ly worth.

5. 

   Samuel John Klein 15 July 2005

   I can see you worked very hard to pre­pare a very earnest analy­sis of QuarkXPress as com­pared with InDesign. This is to your credit. 

   However, blunt­ly, it’s not of much use.

   While it’s praise­wor­thy that you assigned scores to var­i­ous fea­tures and rat­ed them accord­ing­ly (I’m will­ing to cut you the ben­e­fit of the doubt that you were as impar­tial as could be), since you can’t tell us what it was you val­ued and how you val­ued them, those num­bers are just that…numbers.

   Moreover, since we have no way of know­ing what you rat­ed, how you rat­ed it, or why, I have to stip­u­late that I’m giv­ing you the ben­e­fit of the doubt on impartiality.

   Another trou­bling point is, unless I mis­read your text or you mistyped, you are still com­par­ing the notion­al V7 with InDesign CS. As Jeff point­ed out, the valid com­par­i­son is against CS2, not CS! The rea­sons for that should be self-evident, but in case they aren’t, here’s two points to cons­der: CS could­n’t access PSD lay­ers, but CS2 can, thus elmi­nat­ing the advan­tage QuarkVista gave XPress, and CS is no longer the cur­rent ver­sion anyway.

   QuarkXPress 7 is, pre­sum­ably, meant to com­pete with InDesign CS2…not InDesign CS. You may as well com­pare XPress 5 to InDesign 1.5.…or apples to oranges.…

   Unless you are will­ing to clue us on what it is you rat­ed, there’s no point in it; Statements such as “I hope you will for sure find more mer­its than demer­its in v7” have lit­tle mean­ing if we can’t talk about what it is you see that is meritworthy.

   And to the state­ment “Well For Jeff and Sameul, I can bet that this v7 will make you think” the only pos­si­ble answer is “Well, yes, but as you can see above, not what you want­ed me to.”

6. 

   Jeff 15 July 2005

   I just did a com­par­i­son of my own, and by a score of 3,492,176 to 8, I’ve deter­mined Curling should­n’t be an Olympic sport. Like SJK, I don’t mean to be blunt, but sub­tle­ty obvi­ous­ly isn’t get­ting through to you. For rea­sons I’ve already out­lined, this com­par­i­son and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.

   If you need­ed to reaf­firm your deci­sion to stick with Quark by doing this com­par­i­son, then I hope you got out of it what you want­ed to, but your “results” are noth­ing but abstract num­bers to the rest of us. Quantifying your expe­ri­ence does­n’t make it any more mean­ing­ful. Page lay­out is a vast indus­try serv­ing many peo­ple. Different work­flows will be more effi­cient with dif­fer­ent pro­grams. What you gave a 63 I might give a 163. My work­flow is more effi­cient with InDesign, and I argue that more work­flows would be if they gave they gave the pro­gram a fair shot.

   In the end, the only num­ber that mat­ters is the num­ber of hours it takes you to do a project (time is mon­ey). I save close to a dozen hours a week in a Quark-free work­flow (no exag­ger­a­tion). In order to make wait­ing for 7 worth it – when­ev­er it does actu­al­ly come out – it would have to make up for all the time I lost by stick­ing with Quark 6.5 instead of switch­ing to InDesign CS2 when it came out at the end of April. That’s vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble, con­sid­er­ing Quark 7 is already almost 3 months behind and we don’t even have a release date yet.

   There’s no point in dis­cussing Quark 7 with­out hav­ing some­thing con­crete to dis­cuss. This does­n’t fit that criteria.

7. 

   aussi bref 18 July 2005

   I won­der if Samuel would still stick with Quark Xpress if he had to pay 3 times the price of Indesign as we do in Australia. Quark’s pric­ing pol­i­cy has been on the nose here for so long, that, as soon as Indesign 2 came out, design­ers in this here start­ed switch­ing in droves. We don’t just dis­like Quark we loathe the com­pa­ny with a passion!

8. 

   Samuel 18 July 2005

   Yes, I agree that the com­par­i­sions that I did might appear just abstract num­bers as there’s no expla­na­tion about it. But let me reas­sure you that let Quark come out with all fea­tures, I will come up with the details of the points giv­en to both the soft­wares by me and where Quark did score. I will soon come up with the scores that I gave to the fea­tures already announced by Quark. I think it will prove my point a bit.

9. 

   Samuel 20 July 2005

   Here it goes…….
   Feature Quark IndesignCS3
   JDF 4 0
   Transparency 4(Color Level) 2(Object Level)
   Vista 4 0
   Picture Background 4(Just one click) 2(very inefficient)

10. 

    Samuel 20 July 2005

    Its not readable.…so doing it again.
    Feature/Quark/IndesignCS3
    JDF /4/0
    Transparency/4(Color Level)/2(Object Level)
    Vista/4/0
    Picture Background/4(Just one click)/2(very inefficient)

11. 

    Pariah S. Burke Post author20 July 2005

    I’ve read Jeff’s com­ments above a cou­ple of times since he post­ed them, but now it strikes me that I would like to clar­i­fy just one lit­tle point:
    “Pariah called Quark 7 â€œunsexy, but strong” in a head­line pre­view­ing Quark 7.”
    Actually, I called the VDP, JDF, and XML fea­tures unsexy but strong, refer­ring to the fact that, while amaz­ing­ly strong and much need­ed tech­nolo­gies, they’re not as sexy as trans­paren­cy or OpenType sup­port, which were the pre­vi­ous­ly divulged fea­tures. Because Quark does not give pre­view betas to peri­od­i­cal writ­ers and edi­tors, I’ve not seen Quark 7 and could not make a judge­ment on its over­all sex appeal or strength.

    By the way, I sin­cere­ly thank you, Jeff, for your com­men­tary in this thread. As Samuel J. Klein not­ed, you get what we do here at Quark VS InDesign​.com, and we gen­uine­ly appre­ci­ate that.

12. 

    Pariah S. Burke Post author20 July 2005

    Samuel,

    Your tab-aligned, mono­space data isn’t going to work in plain text on the Web. XHTML allows nei­ther tabs nor more than a sin­gle con­tigu­ous space char­ac­ter to dis­play. I changed it to use vir­gules (slash­es) to sep­a­rate your fea­tures and scores–which is not to say I endorse or even under­stand what you wrote; I sim­ply made it readable.

    Regardless of that, your num­bers are con­fus­ing and out of con­text. Clearly you’ve put in a great deal of effort and have a good grasp of both pro­grams, but with­out a frame of ref­er­ence it’s dif­fi­cult for any­one to put your num­bers into prag­mat­ic thought. 

    Everyone can talk about XPress 7 in abstracts all he wants, but none of it will make sense until the NDAs lift and the prod­uct releas­es. At which point, of course, Quark VS InDesign​.com will pro­vide a thor­ough, fair, point-for-point com­par­i­son between QuarkXPress 7 and InDesign CS2.

    Until every­one can see XPress 7 for him­self, claims of XPress 7’s supe­ri­or­i­ty to any­thing are unprov­able and, frankly, bor­ing rhetoric.

13. 

    Samuel John Klein 21 July 2005

    Following Samuel:

    Feature Quark IndesignCS3

    It’s CS2, not CS3. In terms of ver­sions, CS2 is InDesign Version 4. CS was InDesign Version 3. Which ver­sion are you talk­ing about?
    Samuel, again:

    Vista/4/0

    Which I read as rat­ing the still-notional XPress 7 with a score of 4 for hav­ing QuarkVista, and InDesign ver­sion (what­ev­er) 0 for not hav­ing QuarkVista.

    That is an absurd rat­ing, for a cou­ple of rea­sons. Not only does the cur­rent ver­sion of InDesign (CS2 or Version 4) allow access to PSD lay­ers, any­one with the CS2 has Photoshop, which pro­vides lay­er blend­ing, and Bridge, which makes mov­ing between the two all but seam­less. Moreover, even though QuarkVista is, in my opin­ion, a bril­liant XTension and gen­er­al­ly well-executed, Quark is the pro­gram that need­ed it. CS1, even with­out the Bridge, is inte­grat­ed well enough that mov­ing between InDesign and Photoshop to change PSDs was­n’t too tough

    (Note: in the inter­ests of cor­rec­tion, please not that in one of my replies above I said that QuarkVista’s advan­tage had been trumped by InDesign CS2 because CS2 allowed access to PSD lay­ers. This is inex­cus­ably incor­rect. The XTension that pro­vides PSD access isn’t QuarkVista, but PSD Import.)

14. 

    Jeff Zimmerman 21 July 2005

    Feature/ Quark/ IndesignCS3
    JDF /4/0
    Transparency/ 4(Color Level)/ 2(Object Level)
    Vista/4/0
    Picture Background/ 4(Just one click)/ 2(very inefficient)

    Now we have some­thing to talk about (albeit not much).

    JDF – you can check a box in CS2’s PDF export (Advanced pane) to have it auto­mat­i­cal­ly open Acrobat’s JDF dia­log. I’ve nev­er used it and can’t eval­u­ate its user-friendliness, but it IS there. While this is tech­ni­cal­ly not a part of InDesign, it is con­sis­tent among ALL CS2 prod­ucts, and the process is seam­less enough that giv­ing InDesign a “0” isn’t entire­ly accu­rate (in my opinion).

    Transparency – does Quark sup­port advanced blend­ing modes (mul­ti­ply, screen, soft light, etc) like InDesign? While col­or lev­el opac­i­ty sounds like it would be use­ful, InDesign’s blend­ing modes cre­ate beau­ti­ful designs and I val­ue those more than I val­ue it being at the col­or lev­el. Ignoring these is over­sim­pli­fy­ing this fea­ture and if you did­n’t con­sid­er this before, you need to reeval­u­ate this.

    Picture back­ground – I’m not quite sure what you are talk­ing about with this fea­ture. I believe you are talk­ing about col­or­ing a greyscale graph­ic (llike duo­ton­ing) and am respond­ing under that assump­tion. I can see how sea­soned Quark users would think this is cum­ber­some, but once you learn the key com­mands, it’s a small price to pay for oth­er InDesign fea­tures. Not dis­put­ing your score, just say­ing it’s not some­thing that deserves the same weight as transparency.

    Now, you’ve obvi­ous­ly cho­sen to eval­u­ate fea­tures that were exclu­sive to Quark (giv­ing InDesign a “0” for those cat­e­gories). What fea­tures did you eval­u­ate that were exclu­sive to InDesign? Object Styles (from CS2)? Seperations palette (from CS)? Simple pathfind­er func­tions (add, minus back, etc – from ID1 or ID2)? These are just a cou­ple exam­ples of VERY use­ful fea­tures I sore­ly miss when I’m forced to use Quark. A fair eval­u­a­tion would have includ­ed all of these. Giving us the scores you gave InDesign for these fea­tures (even if you can’t divulge Quark’s equiv­a­lent score) will give your eval­u­a­tion more cred­it. Your list should be more com­plete than just the three exam­ples I mentioned.

15. 

    Jeff 21 July 2005

    Actually, I called the VDP, JDF, and XML fea­tures unsexy but strong, refer­ring to the fact that, while amaz­ing­ly strong and much need­ed tech­nolo­gies, they’re not as sexy as trans­paren­cy or OpenType sup­port, which were the pre­vi­ous­ly divulged features. 

    Sorry to have mis­quot­ed you. I just remem­bered the head­line (as the post had been a cou­ple weeks old, I believe). At any rate, the main point of my orig­i­nal post was to say that you were will­ing to give Quark cred­it when cred­it is due (which had­n’t been very often in the past).

16. 

    Mike 22 July 2005

    Yes here are my rat­ings of quark 10 and inde­sign 6.123

    The over­all bpd23 I give 0
    the red to orange ratio in quark is 5
    but inde­sign is 200
    the pic­ture box I give a 100 to quark
    and a 70 to indesign.
    This is how relevent this whole top­ic is. And Im sor­ry to hear your bound samuel, there are some lax­i­tives that can help that.
    INDESIGN RULZ!

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