Quark Quitting Desktop?

by Jeremy Schultz and Pariah S. Burke

We’ve been hear­ing a rumor the past few weeks. Quark VS InDesign​.com does­n’t nor­mal­ly trade in rumors–that was the job of the late ThinkSecret​.com–but this par­tic­u­lar rumor has been gain­ing momen­tum, and it fits with facts we already knew. Moreover, the rumor, once a whis­per, is now being spo­ken aloud in some rather pub­lic places, by some rather pub­lic people.

QuarkXPress has always been syn­ony­mous with desk­top pub­lish­ing. Along with Photoshop, it helped launch and define the indus­try and change the way print­ed mate­ri­als are cre­at­ed and pub­lished all around the world. However, noth­ing in either the soft­ware or desk­top pub­lish­ing indus­tries is for­ev­er. After nine years of bloody bat­tle with com­peti­tor Adobe InDesign, it appears Quark might be ready to throw in the towel.

The rumor is this: In the com­ing days, cer­tain­ly by the end of First Quarter cal­en­dar 2008, Quark, Inc. will announce a total migra­tion of its flag­ship prod­uct QuarkXPress from a desk­top pub­lish­ing appli­ca­tion to an enterprise-level serv­er pub­lish­ing solu­tion client. In oth­er words: Quark will dis­con­tin­ue sell­ing indi­vid­ual copies of QuarkXPress for use on stand­alone desk­tops. To con­tin­ue using QuarkXPress beyond ver­sion 7.3, the rumor goes, will require uti­liz­ing QuarkXPress as a net­work client to an enterprise-grade pub­lish­ing serv­er such as QuarkXPress Server or Quark Publishing System.

Yeah, yeah. You’ve heard it all before, haven’t you? Next we’ll tell you Quark is sell­ing out to Adobe, right? Although Quark declined to return our phone calls request­ing an offi­cial response, this par­tic­u­lar rumor has some traction.

Writing on the Wall

This rumor has been com­mu­ni­cat­ed to us over the past year on sep­a­rate occa­sions by three con­firmed Quark employ­ees, two oth­er anony­mous sources claim­ing to be Quark employ­ees, as well as sev­er­al rep­re­sen­ta­tives of oth­er com­pa­nies that do busi­ness with Quark. Most recently–and most loudly–the rumor was giv­en voice from the podi­um of the Des Moines, Iowa InDesign Users Group meet­ing Tuesday, 19 February. According to sources present at the meet­ing, Jim Maivald, InDesign XML guru extra­or­di­naire, con­veyed the sub­stance of the rumor as fact to atten­dees and oth­er speakers.

Depending on your point of view, all of those spread­ing the rumor may be eas­i­ly dis­count­ed as mis­in­formed. In fact, we would have scoffed at the whole thing had it not matched up with infor­ma­tion we already knew and cer­tain well estab­lished facts.

In November 2006 Raymond Schiavone took the reins as Quark CEO. Schiavone’s last posi­tion was that of CEO at Arbortext, Inc., a com­pa­ny that began as a desk­top soft­ware com­pa­ny but which Schiavone tran­si­tioned out of the desk­top mar­ket and into enter­prise pub­lish­ing systems.

Even more com­pelling are Schiavone’s own state­ments. In a September 2007 inter­view with Quark VS InDesign​.com Schiavone admit­ted to telling Quark senior staff: “QuarkXPress has lost against InDesign. That fight is over.” In the same inter­view he went on to qual­i­fy the state­ment by say­ing: “What I meant by that is that we’re not going to com­pete with Adobe. I don’t want to be some­one else’s com­pa­ny. I want to be our own com­pa­ny. There are oth­er things that are our strengths that Adobe does­n’t [do]. That’s a los­ing propo­si­tion to be anoth­er per­son­’s com­pa­ny. I want to focus on inno­va­tion, not replication.”

QvI: What are some of those inno­va­tions, those “strengths that Adobe does­n’t” have?

RS: While I can’t give you specifics because devel­op­ment is under­way, I can tell you that we are mak­ing enhance­ments to our server-based enter­prise prod­ucts and devel­op­ing new prod­ucts that will com­pre­hen­sive­ly serve the dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing needs of our cur­rent and poten­tial cus­tomers and expand­ing capa­bil­i­ties in our QuarkXPress prod­uct. You’ll be hear­ing more about all of these ini­tia­tives next year. 

Quark VS InDesign​.com pub­lish­er Pariah S. Burke, inter­viewed by his own pub­li­ca­tion, respond­ed to Schiavone’s state­ments with a pre­dic­tion that Quark would com­plete a move to an entire­ly server-based pub­lish­ing sys­tems com­pa­ny by the time Quark released ver­sion 9 of its products:

I think QuarkXPress will con­tin­ue to have util­i­ty on its own, but its pri­ma­ry role will be to func­tion as a desk­top client for an as-yet unre­vealed enterprise-grade suite of systems.

XPress 8 will be the first stage, I pre­dict. It will have few new fea­tures design­ers real­ly want, but will offer greater scal­a­bil­i­ty and automa­tion impor­tant to man­agers of large pub­lish­ing work­flows. It, and Quark CopyDesk 8, will offer tight inte­gra­tion with XPress Server and new enter­prise sys­tems Quark will announce over the course of the next two years. [Schiavone’s] real­is­tic goal for the XPress 8 gen­er­a­tion of prod­ucts will be to make the mar­ket take notice of Quark again, to open a dia­log with large work­flow man­agers who will help refine Schiavone’s vision for XPress 9.

By the time XPress 9 and its match­ing sys­tems do release (prob­a­bly less than 12 months fol­low­ing the release of ver­sion 8), QuarkXPress will be lit­tle more than a client appli­ca­tion. All the real pow­er will reside on the server-side systems…

Ultimately, I believe the aver­age small-office, home-office user of desk­top pub­lish­ing sys­tems will com­plete­ly for­get about Quark before QuarkXPress 10 because Schiavone only cares about small and medi­um sized busi­ness­es now; once they’ve ful­filled their pur­pose as step­ping stones to enter­prise, Quark will have no fur­ther use for them.

Burke adds:

I also think QuarkXPress 10 won’t be desk­top soft­ware at all. It will be a server-hosted, instance appli­ca­tion, which isn’t fea­si­ble for SOHO and small stu­dios. Similar to the way QuarkXPress License Server func­tions today, com­pa­nies will pur­chase blocks of licens­es. But, instead of installing the XPress soft­ware on users’ sys­tems and let­ting the License Server man­age the num­ber of con­cur­rent­ly run­ning copies, users will log into their work­flow sys­tems and use a copy of the QuarkXPress client that actu­al­ly runs on the appli­ca­tion serv­er rather than their local com­put­ers. The change from desk­top to server-hosted, I believe, will begin in earnest with XPress 9, which will have a desk­top instal­lable as an aid to assist Quark cus­tomers in tran­si­tion­ing to the new server-based soft­ware. Beginning with XPress 10–or 11, if the out­cry is great enough–the indi­vid­ual instal­la­tion ver­sion will be removed. Companies that can’t afford the hard­ware required to run such a set­up will be unable to use XPress.

After 2012, I don’t think Quark will care too much about desk­top users because it won’t offer prod­ucts to them. 

If the rumor is true, if Quark will anounce in the next few days or weeks its depar­ture from the desk­top mar­ket, Burke’s pre­dic­tions will be com­ing true much soon­er than he feared.

Pariah S. Burke is a design and pub­lish­ing work­flow con­sul­tant with Workflow:Creative, the author or co-author of four design soft­ware books, a free­lance graph­ic design­er, and the pub­lish­er of Quark VS InDesign​.com and Designorati.

Jeremy Schultz is a graph­ic design­er and is the own­er of his design firm, Jeremy Schultz Artist, spe­cial­iz­ing in graph­ic design, web design and illustration.

46 thoughts on “Quark Quitting Desktop?”

  1. Anonymous

    True true true true – my oh my – what the man says is true!

  2. X Quark (cpl of months back)

    Sounds true… after all the stuff i saw hapeen­ing there… 

    Also I’d say Quark had more exper­tise in Desktop and real­ly lacked basic stuff in enter­prise so they need all the luck they can get if they’re going thru with this!!!

  3. Anonymous

    Any wor­ried QuarkXPress users: please ignore this rumor, which is 100% false.

  4. daryl

    Just curi­ous: Does Adobe have a serv­er based solu­tion or is that in devel­op­ment? Periodically you hear about even large cor­po­ra­tions mak­ing the switch to InDesign, etc. So how does Quark think they’re going to cre­ate an offer­ing so com­pelling that big com­pa­nies will stop jump­ing ship?

  5. Paul Chernoff

    While Adobe does not offer an InDesign con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem itself, there are a num­ber of options includ­ing K4 and Woodwings.

  6. Pariah S. Burke

    Just curi­ous: Does Adobe have a serv­er based solu­tion or is that in development?

    As Paul point­ed out, SoftCare’s K2 and K4 are scal­able server-based solu­tions built around InDesign and InCopy. Also, Adobe itself sells InDesign Server, which is essen­tial­ly a copy of InDesign itself that can per­form tasks auto­mat­i­cal­ly or semi-automatically via scripts and even Web interfaces.

    By and large, QuarkXPress and InDesign cur­rent­ly offer all the same types of prod­ucts. Adobe lets part­ners take solu­tions fur­ther where as Quark tends to do more of the same devel­op­ment in-house.

    You can find out a lot more about server-based solu­tions from both com­pa­nies by doing a search here on Quark VS InDesign​.com for “serv­er”. Or, just click here.

  7. George H

    This is the most ludi­crous sto­ry I have heard from this site, with­out any mer­it or substance
    .
    Pariah, you are obvi­ous­ly strug­gling or you would not go to this length and then be dis­cred­it­ed with­in the next few weeks. You cer­tain­ly have a strange man­ner in drum­ming up ID Training revenue.

    I know for a fact, Quark has some tremen­dous and excit­ing plans for QXP and have devel­oped a long term multi-year road map, which will astound the indus­try. Do you think they would invest in quar­ter­ly main­te­nance releas­es of their flag­ship prod­uct if they were abort­ing the busi­ness? They are build­ing towards an excit­ing announcement.

    Once again, your site is built on rumors, yet nev­er a retrac­tion when you are wrong, and this time you are going to take it on the ear. Your friend from Adobe, Jim Maivald, is an idiot to state such rumors pub­licly. I am cer­tain he will be eat­ing his words in the next few weeks, when Quark makes their announcements.

    I know Ray Schiavone very well, he is extreme­ly com­pet­i­tive, and loves trash talk from the com­pe­ti­tion. I am sure he will use it to his advantage.

    I am look­ing for­ward to your retrac­tion or who you will blame for these ridicu­lous rumors or as his­to­ry has record­ed, you will ignore and con­tin­ue to blast Quark.

  8. mjenius

    “I know for a fact, Quark has some tremen­dous and excit­ing plans for QXP…”

    We’ve been hear­ing that from Quark since like QuarkXpress 4. I think your def­i­n­i­tion of “excit­ing” is dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from mine.

  9. George H

    mje­nius,

    This is not the old Quark. Their have been rad­i­cal and dif­fi­cult changes with­in Quark, as the man­age­ment team has rebuilt the orga­ni­za­tion and focused the busi­ness on a very well thought out strat­e­gy. In the next few weeks,I am cer­tain we will hear some of thes strategies.

    I also heard they had a very suc­cess­ful inter­na­tion­al sales meet­ing last week in Denver. The sales teams were pre­sent­ed with a glimpse of future prod­uct releas­es (which includ­ed a stand­ing ova­tion for the QXP team).

    Sounds like a lot going on from a com­pa­ny on the rebound.

  10. Anonymous

    so we now know who got reject­ed from the Quark 8 alpha and pre-release program!

    no cred­able sources, no actu­all infor­ma­tion, just adobe hopes and dreams.…

  11. Anonymous

    Don’t believe these rumors one bit. Pariah, your sto­ry offers no actu­al facts. It is just false aspi­ra­tion and con­coct­ed infor­ma­tion by Adobe.

    This is just anoth­er bull­ish and bump­tious ploy by Adobe to get peo­ple to switch over to their products.

  12. Anonymous

    It’s the same trick Adobe has been try­ing for years. Scare QuarkXPress users into switch­ing when in actu­al fact they have no real desire to and get no ben­e­fit from doing so.

  13. woz

    I vist­ed the Graphic Industry Event in Holland last month and talked to a lot of big play­ers. Some of them just returned from Asia. And guess what? Nobody in Asia or in The Netherlands cared what Quark was doing. People would not even take the free Quark give-aways…

  14. wiz

    NONSENSE! Adobe-based spawn. And Asians and Europeans and Middle Easterners and South Americans and Australians DO care about Quark in fair­ly large num­bers (in the mil­lions). If you think Adobe is the only source of legit pub­lish­ing soft­ware (whether desk­top or serv­er based) then a) you’re a monop­o­list pig and b) you’re miss­ing about 99% of the real pic­ture in a world where way more cutting-edge cre­ativ­i­ty is found at oth­er com­pa­nies like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Corel, Xerox, HP, Electronic Arts, Avid and sooooo many more. Adobe repur­posed EPS into PDF. whooptee do. then they out Quarked Quark (by copy­ing and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly going after weak­ness­es). Then Quark caught up and sur­passed them (eas­i­ly) and I’d imag­ine Quark 8 is going to be a bit of a fur­ther intel­lec­tu­al stomp on InDesign (which is a stu­pid name if you ask me)… Like we care about a graph­ic event in Holland..I bet every­one was high on some dev­as­tat­ing chron­ic too.

  15. Anonymous

    woz – Have you been to the UK?

    Most of the Universities in the UK offer only design cours­es in Quark 7. This includes Sheffield Hallam University, Leicester College, University of Bedfordshire, University of Lincoln, Swansea Institute of Higher Education, London College of Communications. If you are learn­ing Journalism in the UK, you are more like­ly to use Quark.

    It seems dif­fer­ent coun­tries have their pref­er­ences of Quark or InDesign. But in UK, Quark 7 is quite pop­u­lar among Journalism and Media.

  17. Bert Farry

    I think Adobe will burn Quark in that area too because of the prod­ucts they are offer­ing now seems they are gear­ing up to serv­er type publications.
    They have a advan­tage by hav­ing ver­sion cue and all the prod­ucts that sup­port it.
    Put it this way a pho­tog­ra­ph­er takes pic­tures uses Bridge to upload to serv­er, the Photo fix­ers or pho­tog­ra­ph­er fix­es the pho­tos with RAW,version cue takes care of edits, Incopy han­dles the copy, Illustrator han­dles the art and graphs, Indesign puts it all on hard copy, Dreamweaver and Contribute han­dles the web data all coor­di­nat­ed by Bridge and Version Cue. Each depart­ment han­dle there oen parts of the Docs.
    I know its not all there yet but you can see it com­ing together.

  19. Jeremy Schultz

    I would be wary of look­ing at the design schools’ cur­ricu­lum as a test of which appli­ca­tions are dom­i­nant in the indus­try. My impres­sion here in the States is that the schools don’t always match what the indus­try trends are, and stu­dents can end up learn­ing soft­ware that is on the way out. Back in 1998 I took a DTP course and got real­ly good at PageMaker, then the next year I start­ed work­ing in design and had to learn a new application—QuarkXPress.

  20. mjenius

    Anonymous,

    LoL, that’s a Quark owned web­site. But believe me I have no wish for Quark to get out of the busi­ness. Competition is good. Right AMD?

  21. Anonymous

    I notice Quark a lot of places. woz, it just depends on what mag­a­zine and web­sites you are read­ing. I could list quite a few where Quark is dis­cussed, includ­ing in the UK. Plus, I could list mag­a­zines and web­sites where InDesign is not even dis­cussed but yet Quark is. So I could argue the same thing… if some­one were to just read these par­tic­u­lar mag­a­zines and web­sites… they could say “I don’t see InDesign anywhere”.

  22. Anonymous

    That’s the point, would they launch that only to dis­con­tin­ue the prod­uct, NO! it shows a total lack of research by the authors of the story.

    Who in their right mind would take a com­ment made like that about Quark seri­ous­ly when it’s made at a InDesign user group meet­ing! unless you gain from it scar­ing users?

    So any­way where was the big press release? the big announce­ment? CREDIBILITY!!! LOST?

  23. Anonymous

    I think you are wrong Jeremy. School cur­ricu­lum is a very good indi­ca­tion of what the demand is. Right now there is a demand for Quark, so there­fore, Quark is being taught in the schools. Just like when you took a class on Pagemaker, there was a demand for it then, and as you stat­ed, lat­er it was Quark. I remem­ber it was sev­er­al years before most of the schools start­ed accept­ing InDesign, not until InDesign ver­sion 1.5 and 2. Cause there was­n’t much of a demand for it when InDesign first came out. Don’t you know that if the class isn’t full, they would no longer be teach­ing the cur­ricu­lum. Obviously, there must be still a full class for Quark.

  24. Jeremy Schultz

    Sorry anony­mous, I was­n’t clear: I was being taught PageMaker in 1998, when Quark was already the dom­i­nant lay­out appli­ca­tion and ver­sion 4 was in use for a year. The first time I was exposed to Quark was on the job in 1999, and being the indus­try stan­dard even then I’m sur­prised it did­n’t come up earlier.

  25. Anonymous

    You could say the same for InDesign. I did­n’t see InDesign at my local col­lege until CS 1. So why did they wait so long? Plus, I was­n’t exposed to InDesign until ver­sion 1.5, hat­ed this ver­sion, as it was full of bugs and prob­lems. Some of these bugs and prob­lems was­n’t fixed until CS 2. I’m still wait­ing for them to fix the Duotone bugs, as I have a need for a lot of 2‑color prints for a cer­tain book pub­lish­er. Until then, I have to use Quark for my Duotone prints.

  26. layout

    For what it’s worth I think there will be a release of QuarkXPress 8. However unless it is rleased or announced before the end of May 2008 it will not have hit the 2 year release date that Quark said it was mov­ing to. They said that like Adobe they would have far more fre­quent releas­es, Adobe does a new Creative Suite every 18–24 months and that was the plan with QuarkXPress. 

    I do not think they will make it and what­ev­er you think of Quark or InDesign I would not go near QuarkXPress 8.0 with a barge pole. It will be bug­gy and oth­er than a new UI not all that dif­fer­ent. that’s my guess.

  28. mjenius

    In school I learned Quark, Illustrator, Photoshop, Première, Dreamweaver, Flash, Director, and After Effects. My first job required me to learn InDesign. I hat­ed it. My next job also used InDesign, by my third jobs (which was using ID also) I was total­ly switched over. But my fourth job was com­plete­ly based on Quark. Fortunately for me, QuarkXpress had­n’t changed much since 4.xx, so I was able to jump right in with just a lit­tle refresh­er and whole lot of frus­tra­tion. But it was good for me because I can use both pro­grams well. What you learn in school does­n’t mat­ter much because as the require­ment for your job changes you have to relearn many things. Back then there was no Aperture nor Final Cut Pro, but many places use it instead of the Adobe prod­ucts. Even with­in the same pro­gram, you some­times have to relearn things. This was the case for me with Flash CS3 actionscripts.

  29. Jeremy Schultz

    Too true, mjenius—there’s always new things to learn. Camera Raw is anoth­er good example—five years ago it was hard­ly a blip in our every­day lives, now any­one who does dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy knows it to some extent. InDesign is anoth­er example.

  30. Anonymous

    OMG! It hap­pened! Quark made an announce­ment! They announced a “New Publishing Software”. Check it out!

    http://​dynam​icpub​lish​ing​.quark​.com/dps/

    http://​www​.quark​.com/​a​b​o​u​t​/​p​r​e​s​s​c​e​n​t​e​r​/​p​r​v​i​e​w​.​c​f​m​?​i​d​x​=​1​1​9​4​&​a​lap=no

    http://​www​.rock​y​moun​tain​news​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​2​0​0​8​/​m​a​r​/​0​4​/​q​u​a​r​k​-​o​f​f​e​r​s​-​n​e​w​-​p​u​b​l​i​s​h​i​n​g​-​s​o​f​tware/

    Also, they changed their website.

    http://​www​.quark​.com

    Is this the big announce­ment you were expect­ing? Don’t see them announc­ing the depar­ture from the desk­top mar­ket as you expected.

  31. Anonymous

    So I see quark made the announcement!

    Schiavone “QuarkXPress is and always will be the foun­da­tion of our prod­uct port­fo­lio and we will con­tin­ue to invest in it to meet the needs of indi­vid­ual design­ers and large orga­ni­za­tions alike.”

    Did some one for­get to tell Quark to stop XPress?

  32. mjenius

    Yeah, I’m glad to hear that they are not quit­ting the desk­top busi­ness and that there’s still com­pe­ti­tion. Hopefully he is sin­cere and not mere­ly say­ing that to pre­vent an Osborne effect.

  33. Jeremy Schultz

    I’m glad as well, since they can do both desk­top and server-based prod­ucts with­out a prob­lem. As with all things in this indus­try, InDesign needs com­pe­ti­tion as much as Quark does so both keep inno­vat­ing and ben­e­fit­ing the end user.

    The one thing I was hop­ing to see in the press release that I did­n’t was an explic­it “QuarkXPress will remain a desk­top pub­lish­ing solu­tion,” though it was implied in the com­ment about meet­ing the “needs of indi­vid­ual design­ers and large orga­ni­za­tions alike.”

  34. George H

    Jeremy,

    I was invit­ed to attend the Quark VIP launch of DPS at the AIM/On Demand show in Boston this week. Ray was very explic­it that sub­stan­tial devel­op­ment dol­lars will be allo­cat­ed to their core tech­nol­o­gy “QXP” and that QXP will remain as their flag­ship prod­uct and some­time this year we may see anoth­er major release of QXP.
    I also spoke with Quark’s CIO (Jim Haggarty), who is lead­ing the DPS ini­tia­tive and he emphat­i­cal­ly stat­ed the QXP desk­top tech­nolo­gies as well as sup­port of oth­er con­tent cre­ation tools and open stan­dards are essen­tial to a com­plete Dynamic Publishing Solution.

    FYI, the VIP invite-only event was packed and ran for a cou­ple of hours, with a tremen­dous buzz and inter­ac­tion in the room from Customers, Analysts, and Software Vendors.

    I believe we will once again have two for­mi­da­ble play­ers in the Desktop Publishing are­na, with Quark now branch­ing out as com­plete Enterprise play­er as well.

  35. Jeremy Schultz

    George H., thanks so much for pro­vid­ing your first-hand experience—great stuff for every­one watch­ing this article.

    Sounds like Quark has some good things com­ing in the next year or two. I’d be curi­ous to see how QuarkXPress evolves how­ev­er, even if it remains a desk­top appli­ca­tion I’m not sure it will stay the same now that Quark is pur­su­ing more enterprise-level ini­tia­tives. Nothing oper­ates in a vac­u­um, and at the very least I could see QuarkXPress work­ing in tan­dem with DPS in some way. We’ll just have to see.

  36. wiz

    Desktop and Server are mere­ly dif­fer­ent aspects of the same thing. Both will evolve and become more inter-dependent no doubt. One thing is sure…Quark has a sig­nif­i­cant lead in the col­lab­o­ra­tive, open-architecture vision. 

    After all how can a com­pa­ny named after a mud brick out­shine a com­pa­ny named for a build­ing block of the Universe that was formed nanosec­onds after the Big Bang? It’s like if you had a com­pa­ny named “turd” and were try­ing to out­do a com­pa­ny named “god”. “Turd” com­pa­ny can make a big stink but in the end peo­ple will come back to the “god” com­pa­ny for the Truth.…ie InDesign is PageMaker all over again.

  37. Jan Eskildsen

    “While Adobe does not offer an InDesign con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem itself, there are a num­ber of options includ­ing K4 and Woodwings. ”

    And InDesign Server, which is the core of the suc­cess­full Cacidi Extreme Sever, look here http://​www​.caci​di​.com

  38. mjenius

    Funny, how the more you learn about InDesign and QuarkXpress you real­ize how much alike they are. Seems like the more we argue that one is bet­ter than the oth­er, the more they seem the same.

  39. almaink

    Quark has gone down­hill ever since Macs moved to OSX. They are on ver­sion 7 and still no way to export live trans­paren­cy. As a pre­press oper­a­tor Quark files take longer to pro­duce and have more issues than Indesign files for this rea­son alone.
    Why they decid­ed to include some­thing they had no way to export is beyond me. Flattened PDF’s take longer to trap and also can cre­ate issues with white spaces where adjoin­ing images but trans­par­ent objects. I say good rid­dance to Quark .

  40. Jeremy Schultz

    Good point from mjenius—a few years ago I’d say InDesign had sev­er­al clear improve­ments over Quark IMHO but Quark has learned from InDesign and changed a great deal since ver­sion 4. They’re more sim­i­lar nowadays.

    I just wish QuarkXPress did per­form better—I haven’t used it for awhile but its out­put always seemed infe­ri­or to InDesign (as almaink says).

  41. sugrstky

    I actu­al­ly have a tech­ni­cal ques­tion. You know how in Quark, you can give a para­graph the same tab set­tings as a para­graph above it by sim­ply high­light­ing the text, then hold­ing down the option but­ton – you click on the line that has the tabs you like? 

    I love that lit­tle trick and I can’t find this type of thing any­where in InDesign…anyone know if it’s do-able?

    Thanks.

    BTW – I also like InDesign bet­ter but am forced to use both programs.

  42. Jeremy Schultz

    I’m not sure about the ques­tions of apply­ing tab set­tings to para­graphs, I’ve always used para­graph styles to apply tabs over mul­ti­ple paragraphs.

  43. Blake

    RE: #41. I think you want the eydrop­per tool in InDesign. Double click on the tool to bring up the options.

  44. Anonymous

    ThePowerXChange, pub­lish­er of X‑Ray Magazine has this to say about this rumor.

    X‑Ray Magazine:
    Rumor has it: Quark is aban­don­ing the desk­top. Rubbish!

    The real sto­ry is that the future of content-driven, media- inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ing comes to life with Quark’s new enter­prise solu­tions that are found­ed on Quark tech­nol­o­gy (yes, QuarkXPress), part­ner­ships, and open standards.

    Read online:
    http://​www​.xray​mag​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​/​x​r​a​y​_​v​5​n​4​_​q​u​a​r​k​_​d​p​s​_​1.html

  45. shallabh

    I believe Quark is going in the right direc­tion. Just due to bad publicity/ man­age­ment have made a dent on its rep­u­ta­tion. I believe Quark peo­ple are striv­ing to make Quark’s prod­ucts sta­ble now. I think the focus is now on enterprise
    sys­tems but quark leav­ing desk­top is premature…

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