Quark Is Dying. Here's Why

I orig­i­nal­ly start­ed this as a response to Blind Energy’s com­ment on my ear­li­er post Quark: Adobe’s Best Friend. I’m very pas­sion­ate about this topic–if you had to use Quark and/or InDesign day-in and day-out for years, you’d be pas­sion­ate about the top­ic too–and I real­ized it was a lit­tle longer than a com­ment should be. Hence I’ve giv­en it a post of its own.

Blind Energy’s com­ment (see the orig­i­nal Quark: Adobe’s Best Friend post for what inspired it):

Quark has a lot of iner­tia behind it. Don’t under­es­ti­mate that. That’s is what made the Y2K bug so much of an issue–companies resist­ed change for as long as possible.

That, added with InDesign’s sig­nif­i­cant issues with print­ing (which is vital to the *print­ing* indus­try) is going to make it an uphill fight at best.

I don’t under­es­ti­mate Quark’s iner­tia; Quark, Inc. over­es­ti­mates its invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to its own folly.

I would­n’t even real­ly call it iner­tia; rather I’d call it roots. Quark is root­ed with­in the indus­try, but those roots are rot­ting. Look at Quark’s own forums. Shops are defect­ing in droves.

No one likes deal­ing with Quark’s Technical Support and Customer Service divi­sions. Now con­sid­er the extreme­ly fool­ish state­ments by Quark’s top brass: The Mac is dying? Quark does­n’t care if any­one switch­es to InDesign because such a switch would be sui­cide? The allu­sion that Quark is throw­ing in with Microsoft tech­nolo­gies, in the case of XDocs, over the estab­lished PDF stan­dard? Now add in the soft­ware facts: QuarkXPress, 18 months after OS X is released, is not car­bonized and the com­pa­ny will not even assure users that the next ver­sion will be; the asser­tion that the XPress inter­face and base fea­ture set has worked for ten years, so it won’t change, regard­less of what users ask for; it still does­n’t have impor­tant fea­tures like trans­paren­cy, easy and cross-product com­pat­i­ble col­or man­age­ment sys­tem, OpenType sup­port, the abil­i­ty to han­dle native PSD and AI files, requir­ing users to main­tain two copies of files (orig­i­nal and TIFF), mul­ti­ple undo/redo, full pre­flight includ­ing ink man­age­ment, paragraph-level com­po­si­tion, hang­ing punc­tu­a­tion, import of com­pet­ing lay­out pro­gram files, and inte­grat­ed PDF out­put (with­out hav­ing to pur­chase Acrobat seper­ate­ly); and, InDesign ships with a user guide with­out charg­ing an extra fifty bucks. Now fac­tor in the price and the user frus­tra­tion lev­el with the com­pa­ny. Sum it all up and you’ve got a one-product com­pa­ny hell-bent on self-destruction.

Yes, InDesign has print­ing issues. Not so much in 2.x as it did in ear­li­er ver­sions (if you look close­ly, many of its print­ing issues are actu­al­ly print­er dri­ver and OS com­pat­i­bil­i­ty issues, espe­cial­ly on OS 10). InDesign’s print­ing issues are almost moot: InDesign has built in advanced PDF out­put; if one can’t get a native InDesign file to press, take a PDF.

If one is deal­ing with a ser­vice bureau or press house that is still run­ning sys­tems too old and inef­fi­cient to han­dle PDFs, do it the old fash­ioned way with a .PS output.

Quark has already lost the mag­a­zine indus­try to InDesign. Even Quark admits to that. What they’re try­ing to save–incidentally do you think the Quark Publishing System will live up to its billing?–is the news­pa­per indus­try’s depen­den­cy on QuarkXPress.

Quark is dying, fast. The thing that’s keep­ing it alive at this point is the inher­ent nature of the rel­e­vant mar­kets: Switching such an inte­gral tool with­in a fast-paced, tight-margined pro­duc­tion work­flow is cost­ly in terms of licens­es, train­ing, and lost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty for learn­ing. In this are­na InDesign has the upshot of being very sim­i­lar in user inter­face to already estab­lished tools like Photoshop and (espe­cial­ly) Illustrator. While that fact does­n’t do much for layout-only artists, it does help sig­nif­i­cant­ly with migra­tion expens­es and issues with artists who use mul­ti­ple products.

Designers are switch­ing to InDesign in droves. They’ll dri­ve the ser­vice bureaus to switch or at least adopt InDesign in addi­tion to Quark. InDesign’s supe­ri­or fea­tures and eas­i­er inter­face, com­bined with InCopy and its cus­tom imple­men­ta­tions, are dri­ving mag­a­zines and cat­a­logs to InDesign. Quark still holds sway in newsprint, though, because that indus­try oper­ates on such a tight timetable and prof­it mar­gin (the pro­duc­tion and edi­to­r­i­al depart­ments, I mean) that switch­ing is dif­fi­cult. I think what will large­ly decide the turn in newsprint is how well QPS does against InCopy (again, with its workflow-specific imple­men­ta­tions from sys­tem inte­gra­tors). The oth­er major fac­tor in the newsprint indus­tries deci­sion will be cost: If Quark and Adobe both main­tain their cur­rent policies–the for­mer nickel-and-diming, giv­ing ter­ri­ble sup­port and ser­vice, etc., and the lat­ter giv­ing an expect­ed­ly com­plete pack­age backed by good sup­port and service–the pro­du­tion depart­men­t’s cost of main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo will even­tu­al­ly out­weigh the cost of switching.

I hon­est­ly feel Quark is dying, more by its own efforts than by Adobe’s. Adobe just had good timing.

There isn’t even the nos­tal­gia val­ue in Quark that PageMaker inspires to save it.

I’d like to hear com­ments on this, both for and against (against is more inter­est­ing) my assess­ment of the Quark/InDesign battle.

96 thoughts on “Quark Is Dying. Here's Why”

  1. Gordon Holden

    Very inter­est­ing edi­to­r­i­al. You don’t think Quark X will come out in time to save it? Or do you think it will be too lit­tle, too late?

    Cheers,

    Gordo

  2. Ronald Lanham

    InDesign rocks!

    Anyone that’s used it almost imme­di­ate­ly real­izes that so I don’t real­ly need to add any­thing… oth­er than… if you haven’t used it yet get the demo and don’t just take my word for it.

  3. Pariah Burke

    Thanks for the feedback!

    Gordon: I think, even if Quark X arrived tomor­row, it would be too lit­tle too late to undo the dam­age Fred and Quark have done to themselves.

    Ronald: Doesn’t it? It’s a breeze to use!

  4. John Kallios

    When Quark X is released, I will be one of the first to pur­chase it.

    Why? Simply because I am a printshop and I need to sup­port all the major pro­grams. Normally I do not pur­chase ANY new release right away with­out inves­ti­gat­ing it. But this new Quark is the exception.

    I need as much time pos­si­ble to trou­bleshoot Quark before receiv­ing any cus­tomer files in it.

    Quark will live for one more ver­sion at least because of so many wait­ing for it to use in OSX. Some may be hap­py with just a car­bonized ver­sion of 4.1, but I will not unless it has CONSIDERABLE improvements.

    InDesign 2 capa­bil­i­ties inspires me to shout from the rooftops for peo­ple to swithc over. I feel excit­ed when using the pro­gram and feel con­strict­ed when hav­ing to go back to Quark.

    Just the ram­blings of a madman

    John

  5. SDAMOT

    I think your point that many are reluc­tant to make changes is an impor­tant one. Anyone who is in the indus­try, doing free­lance and con­tract­ing work will find him or her­self in a sit­u­a­tion where he’ll need to use InDesign, when that hap­pens, there will be no ques­tion which pro­gram is bet­ter. Once you learn InDesign you’ll kick your­self for not learn­ing it soon­er. At least, that’s my $0.02

    Many of us have been the pow­er Quark user, fin­gers rarely leav­ing the key­board as pages fly togeth­er, but there have always been those prob­lems and fea­tures that nev­er came. I won’t say there are no prob­lems with ID but I will say that it’s a plea­sure to use and gives me some of the gid­di­ness I used to feel when I first learned to do lay­out and options seemed endless.

  6. Blind Energy

    As much as I agree that InDesign is a supe­ri­or prod­uct, I think Quark’s roots run very deep. I don’t think InDesign is going to deliv­er a deci­sive blow against Quark at all unless InDesign 3.0 is some­thing tru­ly spectacular.

    How does the quote go? “Against stu­pid­i­ty, the gods them­selves con­tend in vain.” Print hous­es will still use Quark, as there are gazil­lons of Quark users out there. Of course, as InDesign becomes more pop­u­lar, they’ll use that too. But it’s the users in the large com­pa­nies that are going to make the dif­fer­ence. Until Adobe can crack those, Quark will not with­er away.

    InDesign does have a lot of nifty fea­tures. Adobe needs to focus on repli­cat­ing as many of Quark’s fea­tures as pos­si­ble, though. InDesign will not win over the hard­core Quark users unless it can do the things they are used to. The fact that InDesign does not do impo­si­tion is a major drawback.

    I do think Quark has hurt itself quite a bit. But I don’t see a death­blow yet.

  7. Robert Allison

    When I fisrst start­ed in page lay­out back in ’91, PageMaker was what I learned. Within 2 years, I was a Quark fanat­ic. I hate deal­ing with the window-shade inter­face, and found, once I knew all the key­board short­cuts, that Quark was the most effi­cient way to go. I could get the same lay­out done in a 1/3 less time. My biggest prob­lem with InDesign, and I admit I haven’t used it much, is that I feel I am regress­ing back to the PM days with the win­dow­shade men­tal­i­ty. It is clunky at best. I have bad feel­ings about Quark and OSX. I don’t think that any­thing more than a botched Carbon job will be what they release, as is par with the past few years. 

    My hope is to see soft­ware come out that is the best of both worlds. InDesign does have it’s advan­tages. And so does Quark. I want the inter­face of Quark with the tools and options of InDesign. Then you’d see me switch. Right now I can only sit back and won­der what is to become of my industry. 

    I am debat­ing a move into the video world…

  8. Robert Z.

    I think ask­ing “how well QPS does against InCopy” is off-target. QPS is not some­thing new; it is over a decade old and has a very large installed base (includ­ing MANY mag­a­zines, not one of which I know of has switched to InDesign.) 

    InCopy is an OEM-only prod­uct being incor­po­rat­ed into sys­tems com­pet­i­tive with QPS. (Adobe’s own in-house project died, after much fan­fare when announced a few years ago, and InCopy can only be found in third-party offer­ings such as those from DTI and SoftCare.)

    As such, it is more accu­rate to judge those sys­tems by their mer­its com­pared to QPS, rather than InDesign and InCopy. The fact is that at this point there have been no sig­nif­i­cant inroads against QPS, which still leads the mar­ket, and that many thou­sands of seats at major pub­lish­ers are on QPS and thus that much more resis­tant to change.

  9. Jeff Dean

    I am a *book* design­er and type­set­ter, with some­what dif­fer­ent require­ments from job­bers or mag­a­zine and news­pa­per users. Letterpress is all-important in my work. When I began desk­top lay­out in 1989, I could­n’t even think of using Quark because it could only out­put to a direct­ly con­nect­ed print­er, but I need­ed to be able to take PostScript files to a high-res image­set­ter. At that time and for a very long time after­wards PageMaker was also miles ahead of Quark in mat­ters of kern­ing and let­terspac­ing. Quark’s han­dling of let­ter­press was abysmal com­pared to PageMaker’s, and for that rea­son alone I stuck with PM until InDesign came out (I did try FrameMaker at one point, but it did­n’t do what I need­ed any bet­ter than PageMaker).

    I am thrilled to pieces with multi-line com­po­si­tion, the sin­gle chief item on my wish­list for years. I miss only two things from PageMaker, both of them triv­ial in com­par­i­son: fan­cy rules and paragraph-style tag­ging. I do not expect ever to con­sid­er mov­ing to Quark.

  10. Pariah Burke

    John and SDAMOT:

    I whole­heart­ed­ly agree. I’ve used Quark for over ten years now. I know all the eso­teric key­board short­cuts and am actu­al­ly quite pro­duc­tive with Quark. With InDesign, how­ev­er, I’m real­ly productive.

    I did­n’t need to learn new short­cuts; many of them I already knew from Photoshop and Illustrator. The rest, well there’s a lit­tle migra­tion guide in the pro­gram for those who want a faster way of con­vert­ing from Q to ID.

    I still use Quark. As a pro­fes­sion­al design­er who takes and sends jobs to var­i­ous places who haven’t yet seen the light :-), I need to main­tain compatibility.

    I believe that, as John point­ed out, that will be one of the two major fac­tors that dri­ve sales of the next ver­sion of Quark, whether car­bonized or not. Designers and espe­cial­ly ser­vice bureaus and press­es will need to main­tain max­i­mum com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with their clients.

    The oth­er fac­tor, in my opin­ion, will be the point Blind Energy made: Switching a mission-critical app like the lay­out pro­gram will be dif­fi­cult for many large companies.

    Let’s face it, most of our indus­try hates change. Designers always go for the lat­est and great­est (I mean no offense by this), while the pro­duc­tion people—strippers, press­man, etc.—stay with what works for as long as pos­si­ble. The costs and down-time are dif­fi­cult to jus­ti­fy if the work­flow already in place works. That side of the indus­try will upgrade with Quark if they can’t get away with stay­ing with Quark 5 or even4.1.

    BTW, I’m a design­er, yes. But I’ve owned a ser­vice bureau and I’ve worked on staff at mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, direc­to­ry pub­lish­ers, etc. Yeah, I like the lat­est and great­est tools with which to express myself, but I also under­stand the pro­duc­tion and busi­ness sides of the industry.

  11. Pariah Burke

    Blind Energy:

    At this point, fol­low­ing Fred’s com­ments and his spec­tac­u­lar lead­er­ship of Quark, Inc., I don’t think Adobe has to do much to kill Quark but sit back and wait. I think Quark is doing itself in.

    Granted, the BuildBooklet script in InDesign is not the great­est impo­si­tion fea­ture in the world, but the InBooklet plu­g­in does a nice job.

    Send a fea­ture request to Adobe. I’ve sub­mit­ted “more robust impo­si­tion fea­ture” (and more spe­cif­ic descrip­tions) sev­er­al times. If the improve­ments in 2.0 over 1.0 and 1.5 are any­thing to go by, Adobe lis­tens to fea­ture requests.

  12. Pariah Burke

    Robert Z:

    I mis­spoke (mistyped?). I did­n’t mean to imply that QPS was new and unproven.

    I think what hap­pened to InCopy is a good thing. Rather than leave it to the users to fig­ure out how to use the full fea­ture set of InCopy, now sys­tem inte­gra­tors cre­ate cus­tom appli­ca­tions using InCopy’s ala carte com­po­nents. They can build a sys­tem to a spe­cif­ic work­flow rather than try­ing to adapt the work­flow to the system.

    What I would like to see is InCopy 2.0 avail­able as a stand­alone app in addi­tion to the workflow-specific sys­tems. A stand­alone would be use­ful to small­er publishers—for exam­ple a region­al week­ly tabloid—that does­n’t need a full-blown sys­tem from DTI or oth­er SI.

  13. Pariah Burke

    That prompt­ed me to send a fea­ture request for a stand­alone InCopy 2.0 (or 2.5 or 3.0) for small­er publishers.

  14. Pariah Burke

    Robert Allison:

    Thanks for the post.

    I start­ed out with PageMaker 3. I’m still fond of it, in a nos­tal­gic sense, though Quark and espe­cial­ly InDesign blow it out of the water.

    My favorite PageMaker fea­ture was the sto­ry edi­tor. InCopy gives that to InDesign, but I hope the next ver­sion of ID has a sto­ry edi­tor on its own.

    I’m curi­ous: Other than the way textboxes/frames are han­dled, what oth­er Quark inter­face fea­tures would you like to see in ID?

  15. Pariah Burke

    Jeff:

    Interesting. You’ve stuck with PageMaker all along?

    As a type­set­ter, what do you think of InDesign’s OpenType features?

  16. Robert Allison

    One thing I like baout Quark is the abil­i­ty to change between text and images in a box. I like to be able to lay down a series of box­es, then change the con­tent type. 

    We also use Expert Layers, and use exten­sive scripting. 

    The few InDesign jobs that I ran through our pre-press depart­ment had a cou­ple of col­or and font issues, but I know that use could have solved any work arounds. 

    What I would LIKE to see is a design inter­face that can be cus­tomised to work in MY style, whether it is more of a free-flow, or a rigid doc­u­men­ta­tion style. I don’t want to go back­wards, or even side­ways to a dif­fer­ent pro­gram. I want some­thing that takes full advan­tage of OSX, allows for image effects native, trans­paren­cies, etc, all on-the-fly, all WYSIWYG. 

    I know I am ask­ing for quite a bit, but if I am to relearn soft­ware, I would rather relearn some­thing that will allow me to achieve my high­est cre­ative poten­tial with­out hav­ing to jump between 4 or 5 dif­fer­ent programs.

    Just my thought…

  17. Pariah Burke

    Robert:

    I often do the same thing with frames: draw a bunch of gener­ic frames for rough place­ment then add their con­tent, either image or copy. I do it in InDesign even more eas­i­ly than I do it in Quark.

    Draw a frame with the rec­tan­gle tool (the blank box icon). Voila! There’s your gener­ic frame. If you click inside it with the Text tool it becomes a Text frame. If you select it with the black arrow and hit CMD+D (CTRL+D) or File > Place, and drop in an image, it becomes an image frame.

    As far as cus­tomiz­ing the whole user inter­face… Maybe I don’t under­stand what you mean, but that sounds pret­ty far off for any pro­gram. Maybe if soft­ware were entire­ly compenont-based—a gener­ic wrap­per pro­gram and snap-in func­tion­al­i­ty… Maybe I’m miss­ing your point.

  18. Robert Allison

    It is prob­a­bly far off. I guess I am think­ing out­side of the “print media” box. Look at how Final Cut Pro works. You bring in all your media, from sound files, ani­ma­tions, video clips, etc, and drag and drop in place as you would like to see it. You can edit tran­si­tions on the fly, cre­ate masks, adjust trans­paren­cy, etc. Take that men­tal­i­ty out of video, and use it for print media. I real­ly don’t think it would take all that much to shift from FCP into a page lay­out for­mat. I think that this men­tal­i­ty would make our job so much easier.

    I know I am over sim­pli­fy­ing this. There are many issues to work out. However, i don’t think that either Quark or InDesign are going to use the full capa­bil­i­ties of OSX and the Quartz tech­nol­o­gy that dri­ves the graphics.

    I guess it comes down to this with me: I am going to have to learn some new soft­ware. That is giv­en. I would like to learn soft­ware that is far beyond what I already have, instead of just a bett­ter ver­sion of what I already have. Look at all the ear­ly web design soft­wares out there. Instead of hand cod­ing or Front Page (where I see Quark and InDesign right now), I want to move to a Dreamweave/Flash lev­el. Get where I am try­ing to go with this?

    I have been in this indus­try too long to moe just one-up. I want to be way ahead of the curve.

    Just my $.02.… :)

  19. Pariah Burke

    I’ll have to check out Final Cut Pro. I haven’t dab­bled in video yet.

    I just picked up After Effects, but my inter­est in it is more for DVD-menu, titling, and web ani­ma­tion work. I’m a print design­er at heart, but I’m try­ing to broad­en my skillset.

  20. Jason

    I’m not near­ly on the pro­fes­sion­al lev­el as you guys are, as I am just a Digital artist/Photographer pre­tend­ing to be a designer ;)

    Anyways most of my mon­ey mak­ing comes from page layout/boring projects that deal with a lot of text and litle cre­ativ­i­ty… Quark has poi­soned me (what I jok­ing­ly call it), I found myself often acci­den­ti­ly using quark short­cuts in Adobe and Macromedia prod­ucts… I used it that much I guess O_o

    I first used InDesign with ver­sion 1.5 and I, quite frankly, found it to be a weak effort, all I heard about were print issues etc etc

    Indesign 2.0 rolled around and I gave it a sec­ond chance… and WOW, I absolute­ly love this pro­gram. I can­not believe how good this pro­gram is for the design­er… it makes things SO much eas­i­er… and (the big one here) ALOT more free­dom to the design­er.. Quark was way too lim­it­ing, and InDesign has provied the keys to freedom…

    But…

    The only thing keep­ing me from using InDesign exclu­sive­ly are the whis­pers and rumors I hear about InDesign hav­ing print prob­lems etc.. But I still have nev­er got­ten a straight answer from any­one actu­al­ly in the print industry…

    What issues does InDesign 2.0 real­ly have? Are they just rumors? The only prob­lems I’ve ever run into is the fact that the print house does­nt have InDesign… and in that case I send them a .pdf and occa­sion­al­ly (rarely) they don’t like .pdfs because they arent as adjustable as a native file from the pro­gram (like quark etc)

    so what is tru­ly hold­ing InDesign back in the print indus­try? Does it real­ly have print­ing prob­lems still? Or is it just lack of support?

    Thanks :)

  21. Robert Allison

    To be com­plete­ly hon­est, Jason, the print prob­lems are usu­al­ly due to 2 fac­tors in my experience.

    First of all, each print sys­tem, whether a laser print­er, film image­set­ter, or DTP sys­tem, needs to have cal­i­bra­tion and print set­tings cre­at­ed for each appli­ca­tion that is going to dri­ve it. Usually, the pre­press group brings every­thing out of the norm (Illustrator, Freehand, Photoshop files) into the main pro­gram (usu­al­ly Quark) and out­puts from there to be sure to take advan­tage of the prop­er col­or and print con­figs. When new page lay­out soft­ware is used, the new con­fig­u­ra­tion is often default­ed to the fac­to­ry set­tings so that lit­tle time is required to get the film or plates out. Until the new soft­ware is used enough, the con­fig­u­ra­tion is left at default, mak­ing the final prod­uct less than desire­able, hence “print issues”. It just does­n’t look as good after press. 

    Secondly, the print­ing indus­try oppos­es change until it real­ly starts hurt­ing their pock­et book. I have worked for large print shops who still use sysem 8 with Quark 3.3 (as of last year), because they had trap­ping issues going to Quark 4. On some film sys­tems like Delta RIP, the ref­er­ence plate for trap­ping was based on the order of plates com­ing through, not the actu­al col­or. Quark 3.3 sent plates through in CMKY order, and the ref­er­ence plate was set to plate 4, the K plate. when Quark 4 came out, they changed the order. the new order became KCMY. DeltaRIP and a few oth­er sys­tems were trap­ping every­thing using Yellow plate as the base, instead of black, so they refused to change. 

    Most of us live in a world where we try to keep up with the lat­est and great­est, but when it comes to the print world, they want to get the most out of every piece of hard­ware and soft­ware, to keep expens­es to a min­i­mum. Printing is cut-throat, and every dime saved means the abil­i­ty to out­bid the oth­er guy up the street. And they know if they receive it in the tried and true soft­ware, they will have few­er issues meet­ing the deadlines.

    Just a few obser­va­tions from the dark side of the fence… I hope this has helped… :)

  22. Antonio

    I guess the major­i­ty of com­mens here are gonna be pro-ID giv­en the title. However, I have been using Quark (3 an then 4) for the past six years, main­ly for mag­a­zine work and have recent­ly down­loaded the InDesign 2 tri­al from the net as the .exe Quark file on my PC got cor­rupt­ed and I am in South America and dont have access to my isntall disks. Ouch! I have emailed Quark ‘sup­po­drt’ (curi­ous­ly based in Switzerland) but as usu­al you get nil response from them–not cool Quark I spent £,000 on your prod­ucts over the years. When they do respond it will no doubt be “we can’t help .… bla, bla,” or oth­er such neg­a­tive statement.

    Straight up my impres­sion of ID was that it was more pow­er­full and more round­ed prod­uct. Hey and you work looks bet­ter on screen too! 

    I am cur­rent­ly work­ing on a job that is going into x dif­fer­ent lan­guages and ID’s Unicode sup­port makes all the dif­f­ence to me. (Quark wants £1,200 per lan­guage ver­sion of Pssport which just isn’t fea­si­ble), wheras ID has prop­er Unicode sup­port out of the box! (for Mac users I am PC based and Quark does­nt sup­port Unicode on PC). 

    So what am I gonna do? Im gonna buy ID2 and save the £1,000’s I would oth­er­wise have spent with Quark and whilst I am at it final­ly move over to Apple (one of those nice Powerbook G4’s will do me sir), which I have been want­i­ng to do for years but hav­ing spent the £800 on Quakr for PC was always put of by the expense of doing so!

    Antonio

  23. Robert Allison

    I am nei­ther for nor against either Quark or ID. Both have var­i­ous pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive points. Quark’s ser­vice and will­ing­ness to “keep up” is severe­ly short of the mark. ID is dif­fer­ent enough for the main­stream print are­na to balk at the conversion. 

    I will learn ID. I will need to. I am not ready yet to ded­i­cate the time, as we are not in a posi­tion to switch to ID in my cur­rent shop. The cost of train­ing and licens­es of 30+ peo­ple is not fea­si­ble at this point. But then again, with Quark act­ing the way they are, it may be the only option avail­able when it gets down to the bot­tom line. 

    I just would like to go slap the Quark pow­ers that be, and tell them to catch a clue. :)

  24. Pariah Burke

    Antonio:

    I’ve heard from oth­er design­ers about the “spe­cial” upgrade pric­ing for Xpress and Passport. It’s ridicu­lous. I don’t know if they did this abroad, but here in the U.S. Quark was run­ning a spe­cial a short time ago offer­ing a print­ed user man­u­al for only an addi­tion­al $50 US. What a deal!

    THAT is poor man­age­ment and lack of respect for cus­tomers. Even Corel Ventura comes com­plete with a man­u­al… At no extra charge.

    Thanks for con­tribut­ing your input to the discussion.

  25. Pariah Burke

    Robert:

    I bet there are some Quark employ­ees (and their fam­i­lies) who would also very much like to slap the Quark pow­ers that be and tell them to catch a clue.

    The cost of switch­ing, exact­ly what you’re talk­ing about, is what I feel is the pri­ma­ry (and near­ly only) thing that will keep Quark alive through its next version.

    I pre­dict Quark 6 will sell in the mediocre num­bers (if they car­bonize; much less if they don’t), but Quark 7 will tank. If they con­tin­ue devel­op­ment beyond 7, I think it will go the route of PageMaker: Quark will con­tin­ue as a small niche mar­ket prod­uct for those closed work­flows that don’t have to wor­ry about keep­ing up with the indus­try, and that don’t wish to incur the costs of migrat­ing and retraining.

    That’s just my opin­ion, of course.

  26. Antonio

    Pariah, yeah I heard abou the man­u­als busi­ness, crazy. 

    Just get­ting into the com­pos­tion tools in ID–much bet­ter improved than Quark. And 12 lan­guages out of the box–hyphenation and all!

    £1,000’s saved.

    Antonio

  27. Robert Allison

    Well, ya know, print is dead any­ways, so what’s the point?!?! LOL!

  28. Robert Allison

    Oh, and PCs are more and more stable… :)

    I know our indus­try will begin to decline in the for­mat it now heav­i­ly oper­ates in, aka the print to paper seg­ment. Our tools need to be able to jump us into elec­tron­ic pub­lish­ing, as well as what­ev­er the next gen­er­a­tion of doc­u­ment dis­tri­b­u­tion that is cre­at­ed, and main­tain our qual­i­ty AND creativity. 

    If Quark gets a PERFECT prod­uct onto mar­ket real­ly soon, they have a chance of keep­ing a core group for the long haul. However, if the next release is ANYTHING like the pri­or ones, Quark will not be able to get back a fol­low­ing. Bottom line, even the giants fall when they are too big for their own britch­es. AVID is start­ing to fall to Final Cut Pro, even in the cin­e­matog­ra­phy are­na. AVID is too expen­sive (to rent even!), and Final Cut does the same, if not more. Another dinosaur becom­ing extinct.

    Oh, well. Keeps life interesting…

  31. Robert Allison

    Did any of you have the plea­sure of using Framemaker, or even bet­ter Ventura Publishing?

  33. John Iler

    I took a Quark class and came away with pos­i­tive impres­sions. We have a num­ber of Macs here and my PC. So I ordered Quark 6 XPress and learned that acti­va­tion is good on only one machine. If you have a lap­top or home com­put­er, for­get about installing it on both.

    Can’t be done. Quark has acti­va­tion so locked up so tight that cracks or workarounds will nev­er be found. I bought mine and can put it only on ONE com­put­er, not my laptop.

    Quark has appar­ent­ly con­coct­ed this policy: 

    “Quark is in the process of set­ting up a spe­cial pro­gram for users who want to use QuarkXPress on both their desk­top and lap­top com­put­ers. The pro­gram will have addi­tion­al fees and ser­vices to accom­mo­date such users.” 

    Fees, right! So today I can­celed our office’s order for 18 Mac Quarks and are switch­ing to Adobe’s InDesign 2. Can’t do much about my own Quark copy, but I’ve got the case stuck up on my wall to remind me not to do such stu­pid things. It always pays to check the fine print.

    The day Quark files for Chapter 11 will be a day of cel­e­bra­tion. Why peo­ple still buy pro­grams by abu­sive, arro­gant com­pa­nies like this is a mystery.

  34. Pariah Burke
    “The day Quark files for Chapter 11 will be a day of cel­e­bra­tion. Why peo­ple still buy pro­grams by abu­sive, arro­gant com­pa­nies like this is a mystery.”

    Hallelujah, broth­er! Hallelujah!

    Welcome to the free­dom of InDesign!

  35. Chad Lone

    The infor­ma­tion you put in this post has been of great help. I con­sult with many Small Businesses who work with dif­fer­nt Press Shops. They’ve been ask­ing. “why do I have to switch over to Quark Express since it’s unfriend­ly and does not play well with oth­er programs?”

    After research­ing InDesign and Quark, I defient­ly agree with your post­ing as it brought out many valu­able insigths. I now know which pro­gram to rec­om­mend to work direct­ly and indi­rect­ly with old­er press shops.

    InDesign all the way :)

    Thank you very much,

    Chad

  36. Chad Lone

    The infor­ma­tion you put in this post has been of great help. I con­sult with many Small Businesses who work with dif­fer­nt Press Shops. They’ve been ask­ing. “why do I have to switch over to Quark Express since it’s unfriend­ly and does not play well with oth­er programs?”

    After research­ing InDesign and Quark, I defient­ly agree with your post­ing as it brought out many valu­able insigths. I now know which pro­gram to rec­om­mend to work direct­ly and indi­rect­ly with old­er press shops.

    InDesign all the way :)

    Thank you very much,

    Chad

  37. Pariah Burke

    Chad,

    Excellent! I’m glad my hum­ble site has been of help–especially in help­ing to break the stran­gle­hold in which Quark has held the design and print­ing industries.

  38. Jeep Watson

    I stum­bled on this site by acci­dent and have read your rant­i­ngs and dis­agree on many points. I run a pre­press depart­ment and I’ve used Quark since ver­sion 2. I have also been involved as an Adobe Solutions Provider in pre-release eval­u­a­tions and feed­back of InDesign since ver­sion 1.

    I agree–we ALL hate Quark (the com­pa­ny) and their awful poli­cies and sup­port (or lack of) BUT… it is still far supe­ri­or in terms of speed, ease of use and user inter­face. ID’s inter­face is a huge sprawl­ing mess–you need two mon­i­tors just to show a healthy por­tion of the often used palettes. Quarks inter­face on the oth­er hand is built on tabbed dia­log box­es where you can reach all of the relat­ed areas of func­tion with the key­board. I can pre­flight and repair doc­u­ments in one fifth of the the time that it takes in ID (and yes, I do know and use all the key­board shortcuts–they’re just not as log­i­cal and well laid out).

    As a design­er, I real­ly do like ID’s fea­ture set–transparency is real­ly cool BUT as a tech­ni­cian, I can tell you that some­times those beau­ti­ful designs just won’t RIP.

    I real­ly don’t want to go on at length. I love Adobe and their engi­neer­ing. I hate Quark and their pig­head­ed­ness. But in the the print­ing indus­try, time is mon­ey and ID is just too slow to use on a large scale. I’m root­ing for them but still pre­fer Quark’s lean­er, faster and every bit as capa­ble inter­face more. ID’s huge fea­ture set has caused lots of prob­lems in print­ing (but this may be due as much to design­ers who don’t know what they’re doing).

  39. August

    InDesign is start­ing to look pret­ty good!

    As 2nd yr Graphic Design stu­den, I don’t have as much exp. as you all seem to, but with the delays caused by Quark’s “bugs”, ID seems like a solution.

    From a stu­dents point of view, I think Q X is hold­ing us back (OK, we’re learn­ing to deal with tech­ni­cal prob­lems but enough is enough ). All 19 stu­dents have encoun­tered almost every pos­si­ble problem: 

    -…can’t find the net­work hard­ware key (right term?)

    -chop­py doc. and image pre­view, qx is slow or frozen

    -pages appear any­where in the doc. repeat­ed­ly even after deletion

    -sev­er­al pages dis­s­a­pear­ing (once missed a dead­line cause I had to start over)

    -we all for­get to save our docs in sin­gle lan­guage so we can work on them @ home 

    Everyone in our class is push­ing the teacher to switch to ID, he tries to defend QuarkX. But even HE is sick of their poor cos­tumer service/technical sup­port. He’s been try­ing to con­tact them (I think about the lat­est ver­sion) since sep­tem­ber. When he does speak to some­one he gets frus­trat­ed, he can tell they don’t val­ue their customers.

    I saw class­mates use ID, I love the pre­view, the lay­ers like in PS and ill, the same shorcut keys (I get impa­tient when I for­get to use the right short­cuts in Quark) and no has­sle with image formats!!

    I ‘m anx­ious to try it out, but I just hope the “print­ing issues” will be cor­rect­ed in the next ver­sion of ID (there’s got­ta be a way to get around those–I haven’t come to under­stand them yet).

    August

  40. Pariah Burke

    Jeep:

    Thanks for post­ing your opin­ion. Of course I like it when peo­ple agree with my opin­ions, but the only inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion is when peo­ple don’t agree and can edu­cate one anoth­er in the process.

    How did you stum­ble in? I’m very curi­ous how peo­ple find me.

    “…[QuarkXPress] is still far supe­ri­or in terms of speed, ease of use and user inter­face. ID’s inter­face is a huge sprawl­ing mess–you need two mon­i­tors just to show a healthy por­tion of the often used palettes. Quarks inter­face on the oth­er hand is built on tabbed dia­log box­es where you can reach all of the relat­ed areas of func­tion with the key­board. I can pre­flight and repair doc­u­ments in one fifth of the the time that it takes in ID (and yes, I do know and use all the key­board shortcuts–they’re just not as log­i­cal and well laid out).”

    I dis­agree. I know the Quark UI about as well as any­one who has had used it pro­fes­sion­al­ly for over a decade. I know it, but I hate it. The design and func­tion of the UI is coun­ter­in­tu­itive to the way humans work, despite the vol­umes of data from sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies about how humans use com­put­ers. Quark, the com­pa­ny, does­n’t care about its cus­tomers, and the soft­ware is the sec­ond biggest tes­ta­ment to that fact–their cus­tomer ser­vice phi­los­o­phy is the first, of course.

    The pri­ma­ry rea­son Quark has remained mar­ket leader for so many years is because it was the only game in town. PageMaker nev­er caught up again after Quark passed it. That got it entrenched. We all know Quark’s quirks and how to work around them. And we all know how to make it do things it real­ly should­n’t. Do you think the Quark engi­neers real­ly thought XPress would be used as a pre-RIP, a plat­form into which to place PageMaker, FrameMaker, and oth­er files export­ed to EPS or PDF, then from XPress print­ed to PS or export­ed to PDF again? QuarkXPress is ubiq­ui­tous. There isn’t a sin­gle cre­ative, press, or pre-press shop in the land that does­n’t have QuarkXPress. If one wants to work in any of those indus­tries, one must know Quark.

    The clos­er one’s job gets to an image­set­ter and RIP, the small­er the prof­it mar­gin and the high­er the short-term finan­cial impact of chang­ing the work­flow. Thus the more per­va­sive the ideology–from Production through Finance–that change is bad. Quark exists in that world, the world that does­n’t want–with sen­si­ble but ulti­mate­ly futile reasons–to change. Even RIP man­u­fac­tur­ers are hes­i­tant to change their RIPs to acco­mo­date the inevitable and cumu­la­tive next step in tech­nol­o­gy of which InDesign is only a part.

    After all these years, we still don’t have a uni­ver­sal job tick­et­ing sys­tem. If the atti­tude isn’t that change is bad, it becomes wait and see what every­one else does first.

    Adobe has nev­er sub­scribed to either phi­los­o­phy (though they were rather late get­ting onboad the Web). Adobe ini­ti­ates change, forc­ing oth­er indus­try sup­pli­ers to change. I can eas­i­ly cite PostScript, soft fonts, Illustrator, PDF, and so on. Adobe inno­vates. Quark stagnates.

    Adobe invests in mak­ing the indus­try bet­ter. Quark invests in keep­ing things the same.

    “…Sometimes those beau­ti­ful designs just won’t RIP…”

    What RIP? Which lev­el of PostScript? I’m curi­ous if it’s one of the many RIPs that have been “opti­mized” for Quark’s “PostScript Plus”, or if it’s an InDesign issue. InDesign writes clean PostScript, which I know gives Quark-optimized RIPs prob­lems with some content.

    I can def­i­nite­ly see some issues with RIPs not updat­ed recent­ly if the linked ass­es­ts are PSDs or AIs rather than the tra­di­tion­al TIFFs or EPSes.

    “…ID’s huge fea­ture set has caused lots of prob­lems in print­ing (but this may be due as much to design­ers who don’t know what they’re doing)…”

    You’ve been in the busi­ness a while. You know it’s the rare design­er who under­stands what hap­pens at your end. You’re lucky if they have any con­cept of trapping.

    I think, how­ev­er, that InDesign CS could actu­al­ly help with some of that. The Separations and Trapping Preview palettes might just be the thing to get design­ers think­ing about some of the issues faced in-RIP. I’m curi­ous about oth­er issues, though.

    I did­n’t respond to some points–and cut short my respons­es to others–because I felt as if I were repeat­ing myself. I’ve expressed my coun­ter­points to your points above. I would like to hear more of your opin­ions and expe­ri­ence, though. Please do share.

    And thanks again for tak­ing the time to discuss.

  41. Pariah Burke

    August:

    Thanks for stop­ping in. Yeah, Quark’s cus­tomer ser­vice and tech­ni­cal sup­port is world reknowned as hor­ren­dous. From what I’ve heard, it’s the worst among the entire soft­ware and com­put­er hard­ware industries.

    I keep hear­ing about phan­tom print­ing issues with InDesign that no one can tell me how to repli­cate. I have no issues with it unless I send it through a low-end RIP. Some of the issues are legit­i­mate, but I think many of the alleged issues are the same kind of hys­ter­i­cal, fear-driven rant­i­ngs Chicken Little’s will always scream about.

    August, don’t take any­one’s word about print­ing prob­lems with InDesign–or with Quark for that mat­ter. Many peo­ple who rant about ter­ri­ble, show-stopper print­ing prob­lems from InDesign have nev­er actu­al­ly tried to print from InDesign. Try it your­self. Grab the free evau­la­tion copy of InDesign from Adobe​.com. It’s a full, work­ing ver­sion; there’s no lim­i­ta­tion on the soft­ware oth­er than a thirty-day time­out. Then try print­ing for your­self. Make your own decision.

    Given the way things are going–mass and major media defec­tions to InDesign, the press gush­ing reviews and awards all over InDesign, the busi­ness prac­tices of Quark, Inc.–by the time you earn your degree, InDesign prob­a­bly will be the stan­dard, and Quark will be a fad­ing lega­cy tool like OS 9. If your degree pro­gram does­n’t offer a class in InDesign, you’re going to be miss­ing a crit­i­cal skill when you go look­ing for that first intern­ship or job.

    If your school won’t train you in InDesign, do your career a favor and learn it on your own. The InDesign Classroom In A Book is a good start I hear (I haven’t seen it myself). Total Training pro­duces some real­ly good instruc­tion­al DVDs and videos, too. It looks like they just released this week videos for the Adobe CS prod­ucts. You should also check out the Adobe InDesign CS Course Guide.

  42. Misterhowl

    Quark is junk. Once I start­ed work­ing on InDesign there was no going back. Never had a prob­lem view­ing on screen (it’s 2004, why does Quark still ren­der graph­ics like crap?), export­ing PDF’s or print­ing. All the ser­vice bureaus I know are using it and I will con­tin­ue to as well. More options, more flex­i­bil­i­ty and a very small learn­ing curve. I can­not wait for the day Quark goes away for­ev­er. It has always sucked and I nev­er under­stood how or why it became the stan­dard. Death to Quark–and soon!

  43. Pariah Burke

    It became the stan­dard because it was more pow­er­ful than PageMaker, and Aldus was too slow in updat­ing PageMaker and build­ing K2 (InDesign) to pro­vide Quark with much com­pe­ti­tion for the entire decade of the ’90s.

    Now the guard is changing.

  44. Pariah Burke

    It became the stan­dard because it was more pow­er­ful than PageMaker, and Aldus was too slow in updat­ing PageMaker and build­ing K2 (InDesign) to pro­vide Quark with much com­pe­ti­tion for the entire decade of the ’90s.

    Now the guard is changing.

  45. John Gossett

    I agree that Quark is dying. I have to admit I am sur­prised it has tak­en this long. Quark’s tech sup­port is abysmal, as are the fea­tures offered in the soft­ware. Word has bet­ter fea­tures for God’s sake. THAT is sad.

    I am run­ning into an issue with my old(but “reli­able”) copy of ver­sion 4. I am try­ing to rein­stall it on a lap­top, but I do not have access to a flop­py dri­ve. Guess what. It won’t install with­out one. Thanks Quark for wast­ing even more of my time. 

    Macromedia needs to come out with DTP soft­ware. It would kick the crap out of Quark and Adobe both. And I would love to have ring­side seats. Affordable soft­ware that actu­al­ly works. What a concept.

  46. Pariah Burke

    Hi, John.

    That’s ter­ri­ble about your lap­top sit­u­a­tion. You can’t bor­row an exter­nal flop­py drive?

    Macromedia has made it abun­dant­ly clear that they’ve giv­en up com­pet­ing in the creative-print mar­ket. Macromedia is all about being the creative-market go-to company.

  47. pubjoe

    Hi, you asked how your vis­i­tors have stum­bled upon your web­site? Well I was googling for a solu­tion for some bugs/crashes in quark. Looks like I’ve found one ;)

    This was a very inter­est­ing read and made me think about how lim­i­tat­ing Quark can actu­al­ly be.

    It’s going to be inter­est­ing to use a pro­gram with­out so much need (by the sound of it) to detour over to Photoshop every 5 min­utes to work-around lim­i­ta­tions. (adobe should pay Quark commision!!)

    Thanks for the advice every­one, I’m going to down­load the 30-day tri­al and see what all the fuss is about.

    I know I might seem a lit­tle out-of-date, It’s been two years since I’ve worked seri­ous­ly as a graph­ic design­er, but would like to get up to speed and start again.

  48. Heagan

    Quark could not com­plete their own port­ing devel­op­ment for OSX. Steve Jobs sent over 7 pro­gram­mers (begrudg­ing­ly) to fin­ish the devel­op­ment of Quark 6. Apparently the Apple pro­gram­mers were not hap­py about being pushed over to Quark. A com­pa­ny that pub­licly wasn’t going to sup­port OSX 2 years earlier.

    I have nev­er used soft­ware that keeps get­ting worse as it is revised. Even Microsoft Windows is get­ting bet­ter year to year (as much as it still sucks). The last straw was hav­ing to repur­chase fonts that did­n’t work with Quark in OSX. They worked fine on every Adobe appli­ca­tion we had. We have since switched to In Design CS and have nev­er looked back. 

    Quark has spent more time try­ing to incor­po­rate web tools than mak­ing a reli­able pre­press pro­gram. Who uses Quark to build web­sites any­way? Every devel­op­er I know uses Dreamweaver and Flash. They have treat­ed their cus­tomers very sec­ond rate and have not intro­duced any new tech­nol­o­gy. In Design is in line to steal the entire mar­ket away from them, right­ful­ly so. 

  49. thommoose

    As a Tech Support spe­cial­ist for the pub­lish­ing industry- I have to say- I LOVE Quark. I Love that it’s laden with prob­lems for Windows users— and heav­en for­bid you want to lay­out mulit­ple lan­guages (2 bit fonts on a Windows plat­form! Hah!) I Adore the hours I’ve got­ten to bill clients for repair bro­ken file headers- or con­fig­ur­ing shar­ing sys­tems on net­works. And I real­ly appre­ci­ate those spe­cial, “We have 4 hours to dead­line and our library is cor­rupt­ed again!” calls… That’s usu­al­ly triple time for me!
    All of this, because Quark is weak­est in what we all know: Documentation and Support. Sometimes, walk­ing into a pub­lish­er with sheets decod­ing Quark’s mys­te­ri­ous error codes is enough to earn adola­tion from pro­duc­tion personel…
    ID takes this to a new lev­el for me— I can’t tell you how many class­es for “Quark to InDesign” I’ve held in the past few months.
    Now, as a design­er: (Yes, I’m more than just a real­ly good geek) I’ll admit- I still play around in Quark 5… For me, that’s what it is— play- quick and dirty lit­tle abstract lay­outs— I could do it PS or ID just as well, but I already have my Wacom pro­grammed to take advan­tage of my style and need for short­cuts in QX… When I’m actu­al­ly putting a job together- I’m in IDCS. Hands down. The best I’ve ever seen.

  50. Bill

    Adobe CS cant even pass the qual­i­ty con­trol mech­a­nism in place at Quark.I t would be reject­ed at the first place. So i am not sure if its worth com­par­i­son with XPress.

  51. Nageswara rao

    Quark is quark and always it will be there. becz even a kid can under­stand how to make a desk­top page more than in a Indesign. The free­dom that exist in Quark not exist in inm design. Yes i will say there are few bugs yin this that will effect in print­ing area .
    The main thing that the out­put to dif­fer­ent drvis not work prop­er­ly i am not say­ing all but a few dri­vers in col­or func­tion is giv­ing error. The advan­tage fro in design is that it has it’s won print­er driver(spooler) for every plot­form. There will bre a syn­cro­ni­sa­tion probn­lem with qurk in these area. They still for­got to imple­ment the drag and drop process inquark if the done..

    I WILL SAY QUARK WILL BE A LEADER IN DTP.

  52. ankit mittal

    its very nice site hav­ing lot of detail about the prod­uct of both compny.
    i agree with the author that Quark is dying due to its own rea­sons and very bad cus­tomer sup­port services.I am 100 % sure that adobe prod­uct catch up whole mar­ket of Quark very soon.

  53. Bryan

    InDesign leaves Quark in the dust. Working as a Print Broker and a Graphic Designer, Im start­ing to see more and more books and mag­a­zines cre­at­ed in InDesign. I only bought Quark to do basic type­set­ting, use­ly from a doc­u­ment that is very old I feel like I have to sneaze bea­cuse It feels like dust is com­ing out from the Quark doc­u­ment. Everything that I lay­out will now be done in InDesign because I dont want to waste anytime.

  54. roguestiker

    There were many things that did it. Far too many to count. But one of the best was the ‘OPEN QUARKXPRESS DOCUMENT’ func­tion in InDesign. 

    This just exem­pli­fies the dif­fer­ence between the two pro­grams. One is closed and insu­lar (Quark), the oth­er is open and col­lab­o­ra­tive (InDesignCS). Adobe has shown again and again, with PDF for instance, that it under­stands what peo­ple want to do…and that isn’t spend hours deal­ing with import and out­put issues. They haven’t tried to rein­vent the wheel…they’ve just put togeth­er a graph­ics pack­age that allows the user to do every­thing out of the box. After years strug­gling with Quark it has been heav­en on earth to use InDesign. Add to this the fact that the entire Creative Suite licence comes for less than the price of Ouark…

    well…

  55. Nathan Tyler

    As a new­com­er to the pub­lish­ing process in the late ’90s, I got start­ed with PageMaker, but heard that Quark was more pow­er­ful over­all. Meanwhile, Adobe was cre­at­ing big hype about InDesign. I went to the prod­uct launch and man­aged to crash a demo mac run­ning InDesign beta. So I knew it had a way to go.
    But I could also see that Adobe’s approach might make InDesign a win­ner in the long haul. They were beg­ging for feed­back. InDesign at 1.0 was­n’t even up to par with some things PageMaker could do at the time. It was only play­ing catch-up to XPress. But it showed poten­tial o f grow­ing up to be a respectable application.
    When I land­ed a mag­a­zine design con­tract job, I was sup­plied with QuarkXPress 6 run­ning on OSX. I liked the pro­gram over PageMaker, but some things seemed a lit­tle old-fashioned. Then, after sev­er­al mag­a­zines had gone to print, we decid­ed to try one in InDesign, just to see how it might com­pared. Because the pub­lish­er was hav­ing prob­lems get­ting into InDesign that quick­ly, the next issue was done in Quark.XPress I can hon­est­ly say that I hat­ed to go back to XPress. It was some­thing like step­ping out of a BMW and hav­ing to dri­ve an old Ford truck.
    WIth XPress 6.5, I got the dis­tinct impres­sion that Quark was the one now play­ing catch-up (whose idea was it to let you place native PSDs–and of course Adobe could do it bet­ter). With what I read of ver­sion 7, that trend appears to be con­tin­u­ing. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to me that in about 5 years, Adobe has dri­ven its prod­uct so well that the tables have turned so dramatically.

  56. Ivan drago

    I’ve used Quark and InDesign. They both suck.

  57. Gregor Postonikov

    InDesign CS2 is great, I think it’ll be pret­ty tough for Quark to keep the market.

    If you don’t like QUARK or INDESIGN which pro­gram DO you like?

  58. PAN

    I’m so tired of Quarks acti­va­tion rou­tines I’ve final­ly announced that our depart­ment whish­es to no longer recieve any Quark documents.

  59. newfoundglory

    I don’t con­sid­er myself an expert on the sub­ject of page lay­out pro­grams… but XPress as it stands, sim­ply belongs in one place: the bin!!! You only have to use QXP6 and then IDCS2 to see that! Its not just the fact it looks so aged… but ID has some FANTASTIC features!

    If you con­sid­er new peo­ple com­ing into the indus­try or learn­ing design and lay­out for the first time, they are gonna both enjoy and have a much eas­i­er time with the friend­ly and fun indesign.

    I’m not a design pro… but inde­sign is a plea­sure to use… quark is not… and I think quark are gonna need to pull a com­plete mir­a­cle out of the bag on this one…

  60. Damo

    I have used both In Design and QuarkXpress. I have used In Design since its incep­tion and have used QuarkXpress since ver­sion 3.1 waaaaay back 10 years ago.

    From my point of view – In Design was the “long over­due” dtp soft­ware that Adobe need­ed to pro­duce to make up for try­ing to ped­dle the awful Pagemaker onto the mass­es for so long. To Photoshop and Illustrator users it was great because the UI (User Interface) was so sim­i­lar in terms of lay­out and tool­bars and tools. 

    To those seek­ing cost cut­ting mea­sures because of var­i­ous rea­sons In Design obvi­ous­ly stood out.

    To those who found learn­ing mul­ti­ple graph­ics soft­ware pack­ages daunt­ing In Design was a dream because now they could just use pret­ty much the same UI across 3 pop­u­lar soft­ware pack­ages (In Design, Illustrator and Photoshop).

    I guess my real prob­lem with In Design is the fact it is too much like Photoshop and Illustrator, whilst bad­ly attempt­ing to dupli­cate the time sav­ing fea­tures of Quark. Now to a dum­my hav­ing 3 soft­ware titles that have many iden­ti­cal fea­tures may seem cool… but you’re miss­ing the point. For the sake of speed a UI should be unique to the pur­pose that soft­ware was cre­at­ed for. Unfortunately the clunky UI of In Design result­ing from try­ing to pan­der to adobe loy­al­ists while copy­ing Quark has kin­da ruined it.

    As for peo­ple stat­ing In Design is a plea­sure to use and then hav­ing pref­aced that with “I’m not a design pro… but” they should prob­a­bly realise that Quark is Professional soft­ware and priced as such. So why would you even make such a sil­ly com­ment? Its not aimed at non pro users like you. Geez. Actually this web­site and its com­par­isons of the two are null and void in the first instance.

    You can tell from In Designs bun­dled pric­ing or cheap indi­vid­ual pric­ing that its aimed not just at pros but at the aver­age joes who have prob­a­bly nev­er under­tak­en any form of graph­ics soft­ware training. 

    Quark may be stub­born (to the view­point of joes and adobe users) but I like that they have seem­less­ly incor­po­rat­ed new fea­tures into their soft­ware whilst keep­ing all the speed advan­tages of their orig­i­nal supe­ri­or DTP User Interface. And I AM a pro user and I HAVE used both many years.

    If your real prob­lem with Quark is it is elit­ist then you have lit­tle to con­tribute in here. Their soft­ware is priced appropriately. 

    If cost cut­ting was my issue or I was a non design­er look­ing for some­thing vast­ly bet­ter than Publisher and oth­er non or semi-professional afford­able DTP soft­ware then In Design would be my first choice too. Thankfully thats not the case and see­ing as I was one of those peo­ple who pur­chased his quark license pre-2000 all I pay is upgrade prices which are entire­ly afford­able. And for my mon­ey I get soft­ware that does DTP at a pro lev­el bril­liant­ly with a DTP spe­cif­ic UI which In Design has clum­si­ly attempt­ed to copy whilst try­ing to keep the Adobe UI (it did­n’t work).

    I work in a direct to plate pdf work­flow. And I have had noth­ing but ease of use from Quark 6.5. I think some peo­ple sim­ply don’t know how to use Quark and unfor­tu­nate­ly they are the ones who com­plain the loudest.

    The only ques­tion every­one needs to ask them­selves is why would you even be com­par­ing these two applications

  61. Typhanie

    Until a cou­ple of weeks ago, I worked in the news­pa­per indus­try. I believe you are exact­ly right in your ass­es­ment of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of switch­ing to InDesign. Eventually they might, but it’d have to be because Quark was essen­tial­ly obso­lete and InDesign had some very use­ful fea­tures that would save edi­tors and graph­ic design­ers in the news­pa­per world a lot of time. 

    The com­pa­ny I came from was huge. When they bought prod­ucts, they more or less bought for every­one across the board. And once they’ve got a prod­uct, they don’t do a lot of upgrad­ing or switch­ing. They are still using Quark 4.0 there. They cut expens­es any way they can, and if that means no upgrad­ing until their pro­gram becomes com­plete­ly incom­pat­able with the indus­try, that’s what will happen.

    One oth­er thing to con­sid­er is the atti­tudes of the peo­ple who work at news­pa­pers. In gen­er­al, they are very tra­di­tion­al­ly mind­ed. Those who aren’t don’t tend to stick around for long. Many of the best edi­tors are old enough or set in their ways enough that switch­ing is not a good option for them. They either don’t under­stand the new tech­nol­o­gy, or refuse to give it a chance. You have to under­stand that many of them would go right back to paste-up if they pos­si­bly could. For them any lay­out pro­gram is a nec­es­sary evil, but they’re used to Quark. InDesign is some­thing com­plete­ly for­eign to them and no mat­ter how good it is, they won’t like it or use it until they absolute­ly have to.

    (Of course this does­n’t apply to every­one, but the pre­vail­ing atti­tude seems to be this way.)

  62. Stephen Hall

    Smaller design busi­ness­es using a vari­ety of large and small print ven­dors, as well as small pro­duc­tion sub-contractors will find the switch to In Design more dif­fi­cult. We’re often work­ing with ven­dors that aren’t invest­ing in the cur­rent upgrades and are mar­ried to a style of com­put­er, oper­at­ing sys­tem or pro­gram. We also don’t do enough vol­ume with them to ‘encour­age’ them to upgrade or switch.
    Most ven­dors I speak with haven’t seen an In-Design file, includ­ing a large pre-press shop that spe­cial­izes in magazines.
    A switch – even if I think it’s a good idea – would be a mon­u­men­tal headache when work­ing with others.

  63. Big Jim

    I use both InDesign and Quark. Both have def­i­nite advan­tages. Both have bugs, glitch­es and quirky idio­syn­crasies. InDesign blows away Quark with its type engine. Just import the same sto­ry into sim­i­lar lay­outs with sim­i­lar fonts and for­mat­ting doing NOTHING else and InDesign’s text looks so much bet­ter than any­thing else. Spend some time tweak­ing and you have some­thing real­ly impressive.

    On the oth­er hand, InDesign’s imple­men­ta­tion of Master pages and mas­ter text frames is noth­ing but odd. Most peo­ple I know avoid mas­ter text frames because they can’t fig­ure out how to work with them effectively.

    InDesign’s sup­port of XML is also bet­ter and more straight­for­ward. The sup­port for trans­par­ent TIFFs and PSDs is also won­der­ful. I use the prod­uct on Mac and PC and it is a joy to use OpenType! The Glyph palette and so many oth­er fea­tures are equal­ly amazing.

    But I do not want Quark to go away! I did not want Macromedia to be absorbed! It is bad for us and for Adobe to have only a sin­gle design inter­face out there. InDesign is good BECAUSE Quark was so good. When InDesign first arrived no one gave it a chance. It crashed too much, had almost NO fea­tures. It could­n’t even do the same things Quark could do!! But Adobe stuck to it, slow­ly adding fea­tures, fix­ing the bugs and lis­ten­ing to its cus­tomers. Fat and sassy Quark turned their back on us. When you are the only game in town why should you care?

    So that is why I don’t want Quark to release a bad prod­uct, or to die. How much mon­ey will Adobe spend on devel­op­ment if there is NO competition? 

    For years Illustrator sucked! But it was the only game in town. CorelDRAW made a good run at them and actu­al­ly took over the PC mar­ket for a while because Adobe had turned its back on us! Remember they did­n’t even release a PC ver­sion for a few years! CorelDRAW kept on chug­ging, adding fea­tures and ease of use and pow­er unmatched until only recent­ly. (Yay, LIVE TRACE! and LIVE PAINT!) (But the inter­face still sucks.)

    Without com­pe­ti­tion, less mon­ey and less time will be spent improv­ing the prod­ucts. We will be stuck with an Adobe that is no more respon­sive than Quark is now. So pray that Quark and Adobe both stay healthy AND com­pet­i­tive for ALL our sakes!

    Big Jim Action Figure!

  64. Brian Moor

    I com­plete­ly agree with this with some evi­dence of my own to add. I’m a free­lance graph­ic artist who has been using InDesign since 1.0. I used to work for a news­pa­per group and worked with QuarkXPress 3.0 to 4.0. When it came time to strike out on my own, I opt­ed for InDesign because o its cross­grade pric­ing from Photoshop. That was a bril­liant move on Adobe’s part. PDF cre­ation with­out need­ing Acrobat Distiller and InDesign’s flex­i­biltiy more than made up for its ear­ly issues.
    Quark could have had anoth­er cus­tomer in me, but instead it showed a per­haps fatal dis­in­ter­est in competing.
    I still work with the news­pa­per group (two dailies and a week­ly) from time to time. Here’s the evi­dence of which I spoke in the begin­ning. This news­pa­per has suc­cess­ful­ly switched from Quark to InDesign CS 2 on both edi­to­r­i­al and adver­tis­ing fronts. Since this is a small­er group of a large media corp., they arel like­ly fol­low­ing the lead of their larg­er siblings.
    Ouch! There went some more mar­ket share.

  65. M Jenius

    Let’s face it Quark is dying and here’s more rea­sons why:

    1. Quark has been very sta­t­ic, resi­tant to change, improve, or even lis­ten to it’s users (or even pro­vide a decent cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence). All this while our work is get­ting more and more dynamic.

    2. Yes, Quark gives you more print­er con­trol (i.e. hexa­chrome), but over the ver­sion updates it has been loos­ing more and more ground to Indesign. Now Indesign is bet­ter at han­dling font and text, which used to be Quark’s strong points.

    3. There are die hard Quark fans and there are die hard Indesign fans. But most design­ers who are pro­fi­cient in both (like myself, I actu­al­ly start­ed with Quark), pre­fer Indesign. I’m sick of hear­ing peo­ple say that Quark is bet­ter when they haven’t even giv­en Indesign a real shot. Some of the worse excus­es I hear are:
    A. “Indesign can’t han­dle long doc­u­ments” – hmm I won­der what the book file is for?
    B. “Quark is just faster” – what they mean is they work faster on Quark because they are not pro­fi­cient in Indesign.

    4. Younger design­er tend to know both Quark and Indesign or Indesign only. While those who are only Quark savy have been in the indus­try for 15+ years. What do you think will hap­pen as they retire and new peo­ple head up the department?

    I respect peo­ple’s opin­ion. And I respect peo­ple who are both Quark and Indesign users and have a pref­er­ence. I also, respect peo­ple who can say that they pre­fer one over the oth­er but at the same time admit that they are only expert at one and not the oth­er. If you don’t know Quark, learn it. If you don’t know Indesign, learn it. Not just to bet­ter argue your point, but to actu­al­ly be bet­ter. I spend at least 4 hours a week exper­i­ment­ing or learn­ing new or updat­ed soft­ware. Computers become obso­lete, peo­ple should­n’t. And that had absolute­ly noth­ing to do with the subject.

  66. M Jenius

    Oh yeah, I for­got. Back when Quark was SUPREME. Did any­one feel like they were get­ting screwed by them? Remember the clunky print­er port keys? I thought I heard them laugh while I was installing their stu­pid key.

  67. Heather M

    Back in ’03 a one hour demo had me sold on InDesign. My employ­er at the time, a news­pa­per, actu­al­ly bought the pro­gram and for a few months we played around with it an worked out the IT and print­ing bugs so that we were able to, over the course of a month phase the design­ers from Quark into InDesign, one ad, one lay­out at a time. The paper did­n’t blow up and every­one had the next edi­tion on their doorsteps on time. I’m now at a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny who is still need­ing to be sold on the idea and it kills me to be work­ing in Quark again. I’m on a mis­sion to get this place into the Suite and the future of design!

  68. damo

    Yay for big jim – final­ly some­one on this Adobe fan­boy’s web­site has the balls to say it like it is.

    These genius­es want a sin­gle User Interface for all graph­ics soft­ware. Regardless of whether that inter­face is appro­pri­ate or the speed­i­est design for that par­tic­u­lar action. As long as every­thing appears in the same place in every soft­ware they open they can rest easy. They pay for a suite of tools with a com­mon UI nev­er ques­tion­ing why Adobe has­n’t cre­at­ing a sin­gle soft­ware instead of 3 (Ilustrator, In Design and Photoshop) that all look and feel the same doing basi­cal­ly sim­i­lar things. These peo­ple don’t con­sti­tute com­put­er lit­er­ates… more like jaw drag­ging mono­brows. They can’t be both­ered to learn more than one UI regard­less of how tai­lored it is to the TASK.

    Of course the best thing that could hap­pen is Adobe owns 100% mar­ket share. Why? Because once the own 100% mar­ket share these guys believe they will receive even bet­ter designed soft­ware, com­pet­i­tive pric­ing and award win­ning cus­tomer support. 

    The only thing that gives me some com­fort in watch­ing these fan­boy vul­tures gloat­ing over the “remains” of Quark is that in cor­po­rate monop­o­lies some­one always winds up get­ting screwed in the end. It’ll be the vul­tures in this instance.

    I for one will be very sad if Quark was to give up and join the dark side. I see the bat­tle between Quark and Adobe as a par­al­lel between that of Apple and Microsoft. Apple was “the man” in the begin­ning… then they got cocky and lost their way. Microsoft turned into a mega­com­pa­ny deliv­er­ing cheap­er but much less user friend­ly prod­ucts to a mass con­sumer base. Then Apple made some major changes and have now recov­ered to be a major play­er in the mod­ern tech mar­ket. Their rep­u­ta­tion is gold com­pared with M$.

    Adobe = M$ – buy­ing up small­er com­pa­nies con­tin­u­ous­ly – attempt­ing all sorts of anti-competition maneu­ver­ing, bun­dled prod­uct suites, buy­ing a com­peti­tors soft­ware and then let­ting it die with NO sup­port = Freehand. The peo­ple who con­si­ti­tute the Adobe loy­al­ty base should feel ashamed – but they won’t – they will con­tin­ue to gloat and big­note them­selves and the sin­gle UI con­cept in these “forums”. They think this cha­rade is how Adobe will always be. They don’t see anti-competitive moves because they choose not to see it. Only when the same ruth­less­ness Adobe has applied unto its com­peti­tors is in turn applied to a monop­o­lised cus­tomer base will these peo­ple final­ly understand.

    Bury your heads in the sand. Believe in fairies and an objec­tive Adobe vs Quark web­site (thats what you all know it should be called). 

    Keep agree­ing with each oth­er and telling your­selves you’re using “bet­ter soft­ware” not sim­ply “dif­fer­ent software”.

  69. Vijayakumar Sekar

    There are only very few pub­lish­ers that are stick­ing with Quark because of thi­er old edi­tion tem­plates which was cre­at­ed in Quark. They dont want to waste thi­er time by build­ing a new tem­plate again in InDesign. Even then, some pre­fer their Cover arts to be done with InDesign while the oth­er pages in old quark tem­plate. This gives a clear idea that the pub­lish­er want to switch in to InDesing tem­plates soon­er or later.

  70. Nina

    Can some­one objec­tive­ly com­ment on this issue as it relates to which soft­ware is pre­ferred for newslet­ter lay­out vs. books?

  71. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Nina,

    We’re cur­rent­ly in one of those rare times where­in two appli­ca­tions serve the desk­top pub­lish­ing mar­ket with com­pa­ra­ble abil­i­ty and fea­tures unique to each. Thus the pur­pose of this publication.

    At the moment, there is no con­sen­sus of a clear, hands-down win­ner in an argu­ment between QuarkXPress and InDesign for newslet­ter and book pro­duc­tion. Either pro­gram can serve such mar­kets and appli­ca­tions very, very well.

    They both con­tain the fea­tures need­ed to pro­duce such doc­u­ments, which leaves only fac­tors that can­not be objec­tive­ly quan­ti­fied as the cri­te­ria by which to make the choice. Specifically: learn­ing curve, ease of use, and user interface.

    If you’re accus­tomed to, and satisifed with, work­ing in Photoshop and/or Illustrator, InDesign’s inter­face is extreme­ly sim­i­lar and shares many of the same tools exact­ly. Therefore, InDesign would be the bet­ter choice in terms of learn­ing curve, ease of use, and user interface.

    However, if you are not a Photoshop and/or Illustrator user, or sim­ply don’t like the way those appli­ca­tions are put togeth­er, per­haps QuarkXPress’s unique expe­ri­ence would be more to your liking. 

    The only way to judge is to try them.

    Both Adobe and Quark make avail­able on their respec­tive Websites 30-day free tri­al ver­sions of these appli­ca­tions. Download them and try both on a typ­i­cal project you expect to pro­duce in one. Take note of what you like and dis­like about each application.

    Now, if you ques­tion is a mar­ketabil­i­ty one, in oth­er words, which should you learn in order to mar­ket your­self to newslet­ter and book pro­duc­ers, the answer I’m afraid is that you’ll need to learn both InDesign and QuarkXPress.

    The mar­kets are in a state of flux right now while these two appli­ca­tions duke it out. Although many claim a clear win­ner is evi­dent, the fact is that the mar­ket has not yet made up its mind. Professional design­ers who wish to remain mar­ketable must main­tain pro­fi­cien­cy in both QuarkXPress and InDesign, and in the last sev­er­al ver­sions of each.

  72. Nina

    PB,
    Many thanks for your prompt, detailed, and well rea­soned response. As a follow-up, can you weigh in on the ease (or lack there­of) of con­vert­ing exist­ing Pagemaker files to InDesign files vs. Quark files.

    Thank you,
    Nina

  73. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Hi, Nina.

    Actually, con­vert­ing PageMaker files isn’t bad in both pro­grams. InDesign has native fil­ters that will open PageMaker 6.5 and 7 files, and there’s an xten­sion for QuarkXPress to do the same (but more PageMaker ver­sions, I believe).

    If you go the InDesign route, I sug­gest you also pick up a book to give you the ins and outs of con­ver­sion, what to watch out for, etc. It’s Moving to InDesign by David Blatner, Chris Smith, and Steve Werner. It’s not an InDesign ref­er­ence; it’s a man­u­al for mak­ing the tran­si­tion to InDesign, includ­ing file conversions.

  74. Steve

    If you are too lazy to cre­ate an Illustrator doc­u­ment and import it into Quark, Indesign is for you. However, espe­cial­ly for sim­ple things like text on a page with a logo, Quark is sim­ple, fast and the print­ing dia­log box is still eas­i­er to under­stand than Indesign. Love the Box Tools stuff. In deal­ing with text, Quark is WAY bet­ter than Indesign. But if you need lots of effects, use Indesign…HOWEVER, the ques­tion is, can your local printshop RIP your won­der­ful page with all those effects, grad­u­at­ed drop shad­ows, over­lays, trans­paren­cies.…? Probably not. Here is a clue/tip: Make a pdf using the Distiller print qual­i­ty set­ting, 300 dpi, imbed fonts, etc., and see how it looks. If it is a mess, your local print­er will have the same prob­lem. Anyway, good luck.

  75. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Hi, Steve.

    I’ve nev­er had a prob­lem run­ning either an InDesign doc­u­ment or an InDesign-created PDF through RIP with what you men­tion and more. I’ve migrat­ed mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers to InDesign who use such fea­tures in their dai­ly or month­ly runs with­out problem.

    By the way, XPress also does over­lays and trans­paren­cies, and, through xten­sions, grad­u­at­ed drop shad­ows and more.

  76. M Jenius

    By export­ing to PDF you already solved any pos­si­ble RIP prob­lem there might have been. So why not just give the print­er the PDF? Some print­ers love PDF (as long as they don’t have to do addi­tion­al work on the files), It’s much small­er in size, they don’t have to wor­ry about load­ing fonts, and it RIPs faster. And they don’t have to wor­ry about pref­fer­ing Quark or Indesign.

  77. BobInWi

    Because I was a ded­i­cat­ed PageMaker user – going back to 3.01 – and got to know it inside and out, I stayed with it far too long. I just could­n’t bring myself to give up all that accu­mu­lat­ed knowl­edge! So I under­stand those of you who have trou­ble imag­ing life with­out QX – or who don’t want to go through all the trou­ble of trans­fer­ring your expe­ri­ence to a band new program.

    It took me a year to make the tran­si­tion! I would do the odd project in InDesign – worked my way through Classroom In a Book (not that great, IMHO). Finally, with a major project fac­ing me, I grit­ted my teeth, bum­bled my way through it in InDesign, and NEVER looked back!

    I know that ID is still a work in progress, but it is a mag­nif­i­cent pro­gram that makes page lay­out fun! (Well, rel­a­tive­ly pain­less, anyway!) 

    A word of (obvi­ous) advice for those who give the tri­al ver­sion a try: Let InDesign be InDesign. Don’t get upset because it does­n’t do some­thing the way QX does. Make the (rather con­sid­er­able) effort to under­stand how ID works, and I think you’ll begin to agree that this is a fab­u­lous pro­gram. One of the approach­es that I like (and that occa­sion­al­ly dri­ves me crazy) is that there are usu­al­ly three or four dif­fer­ent ways to do things. You just have to pick the one you like the best and stick with it – or you’ll go crazy get­ting lost in all the options.

  78. pete goode

    i high­ly rec­om­mend: http://​www​.lyn​da​.com to learn InDesign… it’s a great prac­ti­cal way to learn the fea­tures… heck, it’s been so long since i’ve used quark… i can’t remem­ber hard­ly any of the tricks. I’m not even sure what ver­sion QX is on… last i had was v6… they’ve prob­a­bly got­ten to 7… give them anoth­er 8 years and they’ll add 2 fea­tures, call it ver­sion 9 and charge you $900 for it. LOL! 

    QUARK… please die!

  79. pete goode

    To Steve,

    Yes, I am yet anoth­er user of InDesign who does­n’t know what the heck you’re talk­ing about. I migrat­ed from QX quite some time ago and do TONS of print work, text work, mags, cat­a­logs, etc… w/ my beloved Adobe prod­uct… The print dia­log box is sim­ple as well. (All ver­sions V2.0.2 – CS2)… i’m of the opin­ion that i don’t want to have to load an exten­sion to sim­ply get a dropped shad­ow… i like to look at it like this: i design using my tools cor­rect­ly: logos in AI, pho­tos in PS, and page lay­out in ID… addi­tion­al­ly, i rarely send Packaged/Collected disks any more… i’ve got­ten stel­lar qual­i­ty for mag­a­zines & post­cards alike with PDF’s…

    yes, there are a few print­ers who can­not use ID or PDF’s. I’ve devel­oped a solu­tion for that as well: I DON’T USE THEM! 

    last­ly, we also have a sim­ple solu­tion for the client who wish­es us to use quark… that’s fine, but we’ll be charg­ing them dou­ble hours and the pur­chase of the software.

    case closed, we don’t use quark… and none of our close com­peti­tors do either.

  80. Walter

    To Pete,

    why would you need to load an Xtension when Drop Shadows are built into Quark 7?

    why would you want Quark to go away, when Quark has bet­ter trans­paren­cies than InDesign and InDesign CS3 there­fore will fol­low Quark and imple­ment these too (com­pe­ti­tion is helpful)?

    why would you per­son­al­ly ben­e­fit from Quark being dead?

    Choppy

  81. P Soteriou

    The horse has bolted. 

    I was a dyed in the wool QX user for more than a decade. If any­one was enthu­si­as­tic about the pro­gram (but not about Quark ser­vice) it was me. 

    But you can’t deny the truth.
    And the truth is Indesign is a far supe­ri­or pro­gram (IMHO) and is part of a supe­ri­or suite of pro­grams (i.e. CS).

    I start­ed using Indesign in a new job in 2005 and I don’t see any rea­son to go back to Quark. 

    I don’t think I’ll be get­ting back on that old horse.
    Pavlo

  82. isaac

    I was a Quark ‘pow­er user’ for many years. Magazines (using QPS, which was a tru­ly great prod­uct, though very expen­sive), ads, brochures, just about any­thing. About two years ago I had a client with a book project, and I was forced to use InDesign. There was almost no learn­ing curve. Not per­fect, no pro­gram is, but what an improve­ment over Quark! Recently I had to revise some files done in Quark for a free­lance client and I was remind­ed of all the tricks I had learned to make Quark do what I want­ed to (like move a pic­ture to the trash so that Quark would let me relink it to the new file). Painful! Now I’m sure Quark has made many improve­ments since v6 (the last ver­sion I used, v5 was a joke, v3.3 & 4 were where I cut my design teeth), and I don’t wish it any mal­ice, I just think it’s sad they rest­ed on their lau­rels for sooo long that they’re just not rel­e­vant any­more. There will always be these kinds of debates (Mac vs PC, Illustrator vs Freehand, Pagemaker vs Quark, etc) and since most peo­ple are adverse to change, they’ll often defend what they’re com­fort­able with (the Mac vs PC ‘con­tro­ver­sy’ comes to mind again). But to Quark users who are con­sid­er­ing switch­ing, I say go for it! Don’t look back! When Adobe real­izes it has a monop­oly and stops sup­port­ing its prod­uct (as Quark did), then prob­a­bly some­thing else will come along. Meanwhile, if I have to use Quark for some­thing, it cer­tain­ly won’t be by choice!

  83. Toni

    Totally agree with your arguments. 

    For those who have nev­er used InDesign the thought of switch­ing is unthink­able. I hear it all the time ( I work in the print­ing indus­try) about how quark is bet­ter for print­ing. But real­ly, quark has so many issues with trans­paren­cies and EPS’s and drop­shad­ows that if I have to print a very com­pli­cat­ed piece I know that I am going to have a headache get­ting it to work. 

    Yes, InDesign has print issues. But when you com­pare the two prod­ucts they are both found lack­ing in per­fec­tion in that depart­ment. The true ben­e­fit in InDesign is it’s ease of use. 

    It is just an all around classier, smoother pro­gram. It is like com­par­ing Champaign to beer. Or, eh hem… Mac to PC.

    I also find that those who shout the loud­est about the supe­ri­or­i­ty of Quark have nev­er real­ly got­ten very famil­iar with InDesign.

  84. Egwene

    Pariah,

    You have good points, however.… 

    You have prob­a­bly been for­tu­nate enough to work with a print com­pa­ny that has the lat­est and grat­est RIP. Unfortunately, not all and cer­tain­ly not the most afford­able have this. I have per­son­al­ly had ter­ri­ble times try­ing to send my com­pli­cat­ed designs to rip and hav­ing them work. The down­side to InDesign is that it does allow you to do alot of cool effects but those effects won’t always work espe­cial­ly if you are work­ing with a spot col­or. Quark has the same prob­lems. Sometimes, when putting in a drop­shad­ow (whether using the exten­sion or using the aut­mat­ic drop shad­ow) over a back­ground the drop­shad­ow does not go through as a transparence. 

    So, Steve has a very help­ful tip out there for peo­ple. A good way to see if it will work is to export it as a pdf. If you see strange ghost­ing or fat­ten­ing of text near a trans­paren­cy, then the chances are that your local mom and pop print­er will have a hard time RIPing it.

    Don’t mean to stick my nose into it but I deal with these files all the time and whether it is because our RIP is ready to rest in peace or because of my lack of knowl­edge… it is a real issue.

  85. Mjenius

    I once took a pair of slacks to a new dry clean­er just because they were cheap­er. Guess what? It did­n’t come out all nice and crisp. I was­n’t hap­py with their work, so I did the log­i­cal thing and went back to my usu­al place. I did­n’t blame my slacks for the problem.

    Anyways, I don’t think blam­ing the lay­out pro­gram (whether it’s Quark or ID) is fair here. If the print­er is some low bud­get oper­a­tion using out of date equip­ment, it’s not the pro­gram’s fault. I’ve had my share of expe­ri­ence with these kinds of places. They usu­al­ly demand fonts to be out­lined (even in PDF). Beside the out­dat­ed equip­ment, they have inex­pe­ri­enced work­ers. There’s a rea­son why they are cheap­er. Make a point to meet the staff in per­son and talk to them. Experienced Pressman are paid quite well. The staff and the equip­ment is prob­a­bly where most of the price dif­fer­ence comes from. Use what works and find workarounds. As long as unre­al­is­tic bud­gets lives on, there’s a niche for everyone.

  86. peacekeeper

    Toni -

    Good one you are so enlight­ed . Thank you – Beer and Wine and Apples and Oranges what is the point your are try­ing to make with your choice of mediphors?

  87. pete goode

    To choppy/walter?

    You’ve got a point… why would i need to load an exten­sion to do dropped shad­ows or any oth­er native item that is built into quark. kin­da like inde­sign… it’s built in… but it took quark 2 whole itter­a­tions past Indesign to put it in. 

    anoth­er key point… why would i want to pay $749.00 to do the same thing that i could pay Buy US$699 for… grant­ed, that’s only a $50 dif­fer­ence, but when you con­sid­er, i can pur­chase the entire CS3 suite and get much more for a bun­dled rate ($1,799 or 299 per title)… i guess you’re right… i might as well spend an extra 750 to get a piece of soft­ware i’ve already got… Why? because there are 3 times per year i get a quark file. and those 3 times, i would pre­fer to tell them to send me a pdf and a col­lect­ed quark CD so i can just rebuild the document. 

    but to your point of why i want quark to die… it’s sim­ple… i don’t. I hon­est­ly don’t care. But when some­one sends me a QX file, I will charge them more for the work… because it takes 2x longer to do. 

    QX needs to fig­ure out that they’ve lost the race… i think it would be a good idea for Microsoft to scoop up QX and give adobe a run for their mon­ey… that’s what we call competition.

    If they did that, i’d expect ADBE’s shares to take a hit. They scooped up Macromedia and did away with their most viable com­pe­ti­tion… but MSFT is now step­ping in to do a lit­tle flash mag­ic, if MSFT would scoop up QX & Swish, you’d have a pret­ty seri­ous Adobe Threat.

  88. Mac

    Another view…

    For me the biggest sign Quark is dying (or dead already?) is because you can­not find any cracks or seri­als of Quark 7.+. The last crack/serial that is wide­ly avail­able is for the 7 beta ver­sion… All ver­sion there­after… nada.
    Besides that, serials/cracks for the lat­est updates and ver­sion on Indesign/CS3 are very easy to obtain with­in days after a release…

  89. macman

    or maybe your log­ic is just wrong, it’s not possible/as easy to crack as CS3. the acti­va­tion process now real­ly wipes most options out. 

    you could look at this as a sign of great soft­ware design. if only all soft­ware was legal, prices would drop.

  90. karatedog

    OFF
    That’s not true, mac­man. First, buy­ing a soft­ware like Quark or InDesign is not a ques­tion of price. It could be a ques­tion of buy­ing or not buy­ing at all (and look for a cracked ver­sion) but that is a one-man busi­ness style.
    Second, price only drops if there is com­pe­ti­tion. If peo­ple began buy­ing soft­ware instead of using cracked ver­sion, that “extra” mon­ey would go into the hap­py share­hold­er’s pock­et. And man­age­ment would raise the next year’s sales tar­get. So simple.
    /OFF

  91. Brian Maslouski

    Though I am anoth­er one fight­ing the change to InDesign, I don’t deny the fact that InDesign is a great appli­ca­tion. But I think Quark is a great appli­ca­tion too. I think mak­ing a biased deci­sion on which pro­gram is bet­ter has to be based on your work­flow. For instance, I’m on Quark 7 and it cur­rent­ly has just as many bells and whis­tles as InDesign. However based on the type of ads we cre­ate, we will prob­a­bly not use a lot of the “edi­to­r­i­al” type of fea­tures. For every 10 things you find wrong with Quark, you could find 10 things with InDesign, again, it’s how you use the application.

    I think the big­ger issue is how Adobe has strong armed the indus­try. I love Adobe and all their prod­ucts, how­ev­er in my case I work for ad agency that has clients with their own inter­nal mar­ket­ing depart­ments. Since these inter­nal mar­ket­ing depart­ments for our clients don’t have much mon­ey to upgrade hardware/software, they go with the the Adobe bun­dle because of the price point, not nec­es­sar­i­ly because it’s the right appli­ca­tion for what they need. They are not able to go back and ask for anoth­er $800 for Quark. So…Now, our clients are dic­tat­ing to us, that if we want to work with them, all of the work­ing files have to be in InDesign. So now the CLIENT IS DICTATING what appli­ca­tion we must use. Our pol­i­cy is the client legal­ly only pays for the end prod­uct, and are not enti­tled to the work­ing files, so with that said we could build stuff in pub­lish­er if we want­ed and it should not mat­ter to the client. HOWEVER, times are chang­ing, bud­gets are get­ting squeezed, so clients want to do alot of the work them­selves. So we have to turn over files in the prop­er for­mat. For that, I HATE ADOBE has allowed clients to DICTATE to us, what apps to use. Mark my words, we’ll all see this hap­pen again, when Apples Keynote takes over PowerPoint and account exec are all pissed because they have to switch to keynote, just because Apple will have a big­ger share of the pie.

    But to sum things up, I think Quark has dropped the ball, and that is unfor­tu­nate. So instead of bick­er­ing like the Mac and PC guy on the TV spots, lets share knowl­edge for both appli­ca­tions, and if the entire indus­try switch­es 100% to InDesign, so be it. But let’s work togeth­er, instead of argu­ing which app is bet­ter than the oth­er, that gets no one anywhere!!!

  92. saad

    I find it real­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble that Quark is still charg­ing devel­op­ers for want­i­ng to devel­op XTension soft­ware for Quark’s prod­ucts. This is in addi­tion to con­trol­ling them tight­ly with a bla­tant license agreement.

    On the oth­er hand Adobe is giv­ing away its Plug-Ins devel­op­ment kit for free, and allow­ing devel­op­ers to enhance, mar­ket, and sell Adobe’s prod­ucts Plug-Ins with no restric­tions whatsoever.

    That says it all.

  93. pjdodd

    I work in the print indus­try in the UK and there are still major prob­lems with InDesign and it’s out­put. Specifically, colour match­ing and Pantone accu­ra­cy remains hit and miss, while PDFs gen­er­at­ed from the plug-in are notoroius­ly unre­laible, espe­cial­ly when trans­paren­cy effects and native PSD/AI files are involved.

    Quark 7 is even worse for this.

    I have many greivances with poor­ly trained new design­ers who use these effects and in-built PDF gen­er­a­tors with­out any aware­ness of what needs to hap­pen to a file once it leaves their pam­pered hands. The rea­son we (and many oth­ers) still use Quark 6.5 (or even 5) is because it works, reli­ably, with­out it’s out­put being man­gled by image­set­ters (do new design­ers even know what those machines are?).

    There are good rea­sons why native PSD/AI files should NEVER be embed­ded direct­ly into DTP pro­grams, not least of which is the mess that results when it’s time to print it pro­fes­sion­al­ly (as opposed to laser-ing it). There is a lack of edu­ca­tion about the rea­sons why say flat­tened TIFF files are pre­ferred over PSD and it seems as though Adobe and Quark have been try­ing to out­do each oth­er to see who could impli­ment this fastest and bestest. 

    Quark is dying, this is true. But I can­not see InDesign being it’s replace­ment in the UK, giv­ing that we have a very high PDF ori­en­tat­ed work­flow and InDesign just mess­es that up, a lot.

  94. Martin

    Say what any­one will, I pro­duce a mag­a­zine reg­ul­r­ly in the UK and 4 coun­tries. Indesign takes on aver­age 4 more click or pull downs per move than Quark. It’s screen redraw is a time hog, and the type han­dling is disasterous.

    I wish I had a good System8 Mac, with a lot of ram and fonts. And I wish I had a copy of Q5.5 on it, and I wish I could out­put my PDF’s from it. My work week would be around 15 hours short­er. My pub­li­ca­tion woudl look 15x better. 

    Quark needs to grow up. Adobe needs t stop pig­ging on the industry.

    Too bad that real typog­ra­phy is dead, and design has now become 100% behold­en to com­put­er geeks and their software.

  95. Keith

    Our com­pa­ny in the UK is still using quark 7, as our core tool, However we do use inde­sign but to a much less­er extent, (part­ly because, i am the only one in our art­work­ing team that can use inde­sign), when Quark released ver­sion 8, i thought at last per­haps they will include the fea­tures that would aid pro­duc­tion, that were in Indesign, like table styles and cell styles, linked tables, and undo for the pages, palette. Unfortunately they have over looked these fea­tures, and what they have done, is redo the inter­face.. there was noth­ing wrong with the inter­face that was in quark 7.

    Adobe have just released Indesign CS4 which is streets ahead of quark, they have lis­tened to their user base, and devel­oped a prod­uct in reflec­tion of this.

    Quark have lost there way, per­haps they need to lis­ten to their users.

    Quark for years were the indus­try stan­dard for lay­out and design, but alas they no longer are.

    In response to Martins com­ments (above), Indesign is faster than quark, (you can set the images to draft, to speed redraw) it also includes a live pre­view (CS2 and CS3), pre­view the page with bleed etc.. you can cus­tomize the menu and short­cuts, so that, you would use less clicks than quark, and if you are famil­iar with Quark, cus­tomize the short­cuts to match Quarks. I don’t under­stand what is meant by type han­dling is a dis­as­ter, Indesign’s han­dling of Style sheets for both char­ac­ter and para­graph, is far supe­ri­or to quarks and has bet­ter imple­men­ta­tion of Open Type (otf) fonts and best of all no palette bold or palette italic!

    Quark isnt dying its dead.

  96. lightbulb

    Once and for all. The ‘indesign mad­ness’ (an illnes of believ­ing in an infe­ri­or soft­ware) start­ed only for a few stu­pid rea­sons which have no real con­nec­tion with soft­ware per­for­mance. People who nev­er worked on a decent project (egg. news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines etc.), who had all the time in the world before final deliv­ery of their work, were blind­ed by inde­sign and it’s ’sparkling christ­mass look’ (which has no prop­er use any­way). Not to men­tion that 95 per­cent of peo­ple who curse Quark has nev­er seen Quark or ever done any­thing with it. And of course not to be for­goten inde­sign is a lot cheap­er and was eas­i­er to get hold of it.
    I can state with 18 years indus­try expe­ri­ence as an art direc­tor with both Quark and Indesign (since ver­sion 1.5) that now­days Quark is still far bet­ter tool. Especially now with ver­sion 8 Quark man­aged to final­ly knock down indesign.

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