Still Laughing At Quark

19 thoughts on “Still Laughing At Quark”

1. 

   QxP Hater 22 July 2003

   Nice bit on Quark. I have been fed up to HERE with those peo­ple for years, and It’s down­right amus­ing to see thi­er down­ward spi­ral in full swing at last. They did a VERY amus­ing and slight­ly offen­sive demo of 6 at Macwolrd last week, com­plete with a crash!!

   Anyway, i work for a good-size pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny that makes games (I can’t tell you the name, but it rymes with “Blizzards of the Toast”). Our entire design shop is in the process of migrat­ing to ID right now, a deci­sion that was made a long time ago. So it IS pos­si­ble for a large shop to dump the chumps, and you bet it will hap­pen quick­ly now that Quark 6 has shown us how sim­ply super it is.

2. 

   Pariah Burke 23 July 2003

   Thanks for the post, QxP Hater. “Blizzards…” is a large pub­lish­er. I’m quite hap­py to see such a rec­og­niz­able and cre­ative shop to be dump­ing the Q and, to quote an Adobe but­ton I once saw at a tradeshow, count­ing itself In.

   Thanks for shar­ing that with me and with the many lurk­ing Quark and InDesign read­ers of this blog!

3. 

   Not So Random Person 28 July 2003

   (ok, so I’m back­track­ing through yer blog. Deal.)

   I was in GD school about (gah!) 10 years ago. I remem­ber Quark being this com­plete­ly counter-intuitive peice of glarb, and I man­aged to com­plete­ly kark up my ferst project using it.

   Still try­ing to get used to ID2. I think it would help if I had an actu­al project, instead of just dink­ing around.

   Oh, and Frame makes my brain hurt.

4. 

   Pariah Burke 29 July 2003

   FrameMaker makes every­one’s brain hurt. I use it (on occa­sion) and my brain hurts. It’s not a design­ers’ pro­gram; it’s a tech­ni­cal writer’s tool.

5. 

   Quark must die 18 August 2003

   I final­ly got QX 6 in last week after being on about a six month wait­ing list. In hind­sight I got all excit­ed about the mul­ti­ple undo’s and the enhanced pre­views, you know stuff that most com­pa­nies includ­ed in their pro­grams from the start. It is nice to see what you are work­ing on, and the undo’s should have been here a long time ago. But alas the pro­gram is the same rigid stick in the mud, non user friend­ly vicious piece of crap we are all accus­tomed too. I’ve only been out in the field for about 5 years so I’m no where close to mak­ing pol­i­cy at this com­pa­ny. But rest assured I’ll get there and when I do I’ll be damned if a Graphic Designer on my watch ever has to slave over this insane piece of junk. To hell with em’ with their pris­sy lit­tle uppi­ty non cus­tomer sup­port hav­ing, 25 min­utes to save a sim­ple pdf proof ass­holes. They have bent over this cus­tomer for the last time, and hope­ful­ly rebel­lion is on the way.

6. 

   Pariah Burke 18 August 2003

   Hahaha–forgive me-ahahah. Ha. Ha. Ok. I’ve got it under con­trol. Forgive me, but your rant was phrased so humor­ous­ly. That was funny!

   I com­plete­ly agree with you re: Quark. I got 6 a cou­ple months ago–and saw some of the betas before that–and, yeah, it looked cool. But every­thing looks cool car­bonized. InDesign looks very cool too (and has for a year and a half), but InDesign also works. Quark is…

   Quark 6 is the same as Quark 5 is the same as Quark 4 is the same as Quark 3.3.

   Have you checked out InDesign? Adobe has resources to help com­pa­nies make the change to InDesign. You should give them a call and point the Adobe peo­ple to your Art Director. Let Adobe fight the bat­tle for you.

7. 

   Quark must Die 19 August 2003

   Well, please for­give my crude­ness, but I wrote that after the progam in ques­tion had just locked me up twice. I think was due to a type issue. Leave it to Quark to now tell me what type­face I have to use. I swear no oth­er com­pa­ny in the world could sur­vive alien­at­ing their core mar­ket like this. I have used InDesign, and it’s great just like slip­ping on an old base­ball cap, it just fits. All the con­trols are real­ly sim­i­lar to Illustrator and Pagemaker, and you can tell they kept the Quark user in mind as well with the handy index in the back of the book. I would think that any­one who has to spent more than eight hours a day in Quark would be just as pissed as I am, any­way thanks for giv­ing me a place to vent.

8. 

   Pariah Burke 19 August 2003

   You should read the com­ments on this oth­er post, Quark Is Dying. Here’s Why. You’re not alone.

   Maybe I can help with your type­face issue. What prob­lem are you hav­ing with the type­face? What face is it? What for­mat is the font (Type 1, TrueType, OpenType, etc)? Does it work in oth­er programs?

9. 

   QmustD 24 August 2003

   I think that I got the type­face prob­lem worked out. Right now I’m hav­ing anoth­er issue with 6.0 that I can’t seem to work out. In fact I’ve had to switch back to 5 in order to keep my projects on sched­ule. When key­ing in copy or adjust­ing copy that I’ve past­ed into a text box some­times the space bar won’t work. It’s like the space bar has been set as some kind of short­cut but­ton, because when I press it the con­tex­tu­al menu for the undo’s in the low­er left hand cor­ner of the screen pops up. I know that it is not a key­board issue in OS 9 or X because in any of the oth­er pro­grams I have run­ning on eather oper­at­ing sys­tem every­thing seems to work fine. Any help you might have to offer would be great­ly appre­ci­at­ed, or I guess I could just call Quark sup­port… Ha Ha Ha.

10. 

    Pariah Burke 25 August 2003

    I’ve nev­er heard of that issue. ‘Course, I don’t work in Quark sup­port either. If I did, I would­n’t be talk­ing to you since you’re a cus­tomer, would I?

    I, uh… I’m sor­ry, man. I think–oh, God!–I think you have to call Quark [wom­an’s scream heard in background].

    A font thing I might be able to help with, though. An InDesign thing I could almost cer­tain­ly help with.

11. 

    Lonely Typographer 30 August 2003

    Had to make one flame on QXP 6.

    I bought it, threw it on my iBook last month. Then I just upgrad­ed to a 12″ Powerbook, delet­ed it off the iBook and rein­stalled on the Powerbook.

    Went to use it and the acti­va­tion require­ment said I was installed on too many com­put­ers! Call tech sup­port (which is now based in India and while they speak English fair­ly well, it takes them for­ev­er to under­tand what you’ll talk­ing about).

    I could­n’t resolve this by phone, ’cause you have to send in a reac­ti­va­tion form by FAX! (every­one else is on e‑mail – hell, most peo­ple don’t have access to fax machines any more).

    They were sup­pose to get back to me with­in 24 hours (gee, glad I was­n’t on a dead­line). It’s been three days and I still haven’t heard from Quark. If you go on their web­site, they’ve delet­ed the forum sec­tion (sup­pos­ed­ly to “enhance” it). You got to fig­ure peo­ple are going bal­lis­tic about this, but there’s no place to com­plain or share the pain.

    Our IT dept at the ad agency I work has announced that it has no plans to upgrade to Quark 6 unless the cre­atives demand it, instead plan­ning to roll out InDesign 3 in 1st quar­ter 2004. So far, most ot the cre­atives are going along with the idea (it was smart of IT to dump ID 2 on all ter­mi­nals that ungrad­ed to OS X.

    Every time I think Quark’s cus­tomer ser­vice has hit rock bot­tom, they set the bar even lower.

    Thanks for giv­ing me the oppor­tu­ni­ty to vent (you came up in Google when I searched “Quark Sucks!”).

12. 

    Pariah Burke 1 September 2003

    L.T.,

    Thanks for tak­ing the time to share your frus­tra­tions. As you can see, a num­ber of peo­ple vent their frus­tra­tions on this and my oth­er Quark-related threads. Even more–a few hun­dred from the logs–read with­out responding.

    I’d heard about the acti­va­tion in Quark 6, but I did­n’t know it was that strict. So you’re allowed one acti­va­tion with­out faxed proof of pur­chase? Nice. Real nice. Even Microsoft, king of soft­ware annoy­ances, allows two instal­la­tions before p.o.p. is required.

    This thread comes up under “Quark Sucks,” huh? Cool.

    Thanks again for post­ing. Let us know how long it ulti­mate­ly takes for Quark to reac­ti­vate you.

13. 

    freezerburned 22 September 2003

    I am a graph­ic design stu­dent in my last year, and all my instruc­tors refuse to even look at InDesign.

    I hate quark… it reminds me of sys­tem 6.0.4 on my IIcx back in 1989… counter intu­itive, ugly (i don’t have quark 6, and i don’t plan on buy­ing it.) and a pain to use.… 

    Perhaps when Q first came out it was the best in its class, but now it needs to be thrown away… 

    I have made it a habit to use InDesign when the instruc­tor asks for some­thing to be done in Quark, and my projects always look bet­ter than my class­mates who used Quark 5. (prob­a­bly due to the fact that we don’t have post­script print­ers, so quark prints jag­gies everywhere)

    As far as price goes, for a stu­dent, InDesign is the bet­ter choice, as you can get the adobe design bun­dle (Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign) for only $999 (edu­ca­tion­al price) or $1199 (retail price).… quark 6 costs $899, and you still need to pur­chase a vec­tor image pro­gram and a raster image program.

    InDesign’s abil­i­ty to import quark doc­u­ments is price­less, because i can work on quark at school with the instruc­tors hov­er­ing over my shoul­der, and take it home and import it into InDesign. now if only i could export my InDesign doc­u­ments to a quark for­mat (and keep all of ben­e­fits of InDesign, like transparency)…

    Thank you for let­ting me rant.

    I too, found this site by search­ing for “Quark sucks” on google.

    some­one should pur­chase quark​sucks​.com it seems to be open… :)

14. 

    clay 1 November 2003

    1 more on board the Quark sucks train. i bought quarkXpress 6 for mac Os X 10.2 and try­ing to get this sono­fabitch to export a decent look­ing pdf is god­damn impos­si­ble. the export func­tion is like some kind of fuck­ing voodoo rit­u­al, and after rep­peat­ed tries it sim­ply refus­es to out­put the pdf.

    called cus­tomer sup­port, the most point­less excer­cise i have ever under­tak­en. The fuck at the oth­er end of the phone point­ed me to a link for an Xtension that enables full res­o­lu­tion pre­view for ver­sion 5. were you not lis­ten­ing?!!! i have ver­sion 6???! and what good is that going to do me for export­ing pdfs? 

    i have a clien­t’s job locked in the dun­geon of this god­damn soft­ware because i am utter­ly unable to cre­ate a decent proof. tried sav­ing the job as a eps, it refused

    if this soft­ware was a per­son, i would chain-whip that moth­er­fuck­er to with­in an inch of his life.

    if any­body has any answers for this pdf prob­lem please enlight­en me; plan9design@​charter.​net

15. 

    Pariah Burke 4 November 2003

    Clay,

    Do you have Acrobat? Can you print to Distiller (Create Adobe PDF in ver­sion 6)? If not, can you print to PS? I’d be hap­py to take your PS code and dis­till it to PDF for you.

16. 

    almost 14 August 2004

    I was lit­er­al­ly moments away from pur­chas­ing Quark online when I found your blog. As I work almost entire­ly with Illustrator and Photoshop I am cer­tain that I’ll pre­fer InDesign. Thank you so much for sav­ing me from a lot of frus­tra­tion work­ing with Quark. 

    I just got off the phone with my print­er and he said they are try­ing to encour­age all their clients to go to InDesign.

17. 

    Pariah Burke 21 August 2004

    That’s great, Almost! Thanks for let­ting me know about your experience.

    So your print­er is actu­al­ly encour­ag­ing clients to use InDesign? Holy cow! Hell has frozen over!

18. 

    John Date 2 September 2004

    A Quark “Feature” Listing

    Below is my ever-growing list of Quark issues, as I real­ize them, com­piled under three main head­ings. Somewhere, some­one should start a list­ing of Users’ Quark and InDesign by Fault & Feature, so that the real user com­mu­ni­ty can com­pare the two.

    Aaaanyway, here’s MY list:

    STILL, SINCE QUARK BEGAN:

    1. No way to update imagery (to dif­fer­ent name) short of “hid­ing & replac­ing” it.

    2. Lousy link­age of for­mats for pre­view in Open dia­log. JPEG, PDF, 

    3. Horrible screen col­or accuracy.

    4. Lousy PDF import compatibility.

    5. Completely incom­plete undos. Guess we should be darn thank­ful we can multi-undo any­thing at all.

    6. Adding col­ors requires Menu item.

    7. Step and Repeat key com­mand con­flicts with MAC OS X Dock Hide command

    9. No Style adds in palette! Editing a style still requires three or four “OK“s, some of which require mouse action!

    10. Can’t apply any attrib­ut­es to mul­ti­ple objects, even text or stroke attibutes when objects are EXACTLY THE SAME!

    11. Lousy con­trol in enlarg­ing, and manip., when guide snaps become very annoying.

    12. No dis­play of quark doc con­tents in Finder pre­view wdw. So many oth­er apps do this!

    13. Lousy con­trol over graph­ic objects (keep­ing lines straight when edit­ing, etc.)

    14. No mul­ti­ple win­dows for viewing/work.

    15. No pre­views from dialogs (only a few “Apply“s that require a click to update).

    16. Horrible feed­back huerit­ics: no way to assess delta x/y, etc.

    17. File brows­ing can’t remem­ber anything!

    NEW NASTY ISSUES:

    1. Had to change the Zoom key com­mand, did­n’t they. Is there a more stren­u­ous fin­ger com­bi­na­tion than the forefinger-thumb-together? Oh, yes, add the mid­dle fin­ger and rotate ‑40 degrees for Zoom Out.

    2. Hacker dbl- click required in OS X Browser dia­log. New fold­er cre­ate also results in back­ing out to par­ent, then hangs- so requires fur­ther back­out to save to new folder.

    3. Lost rewrap pre­view when resiz­ing text box­es (this was SO useful!)

    4. Skiddish Print set­tings can’t remem­ber what is what. 

    OVERALL ISSUES:

    1. Quark just can’t get over the Menu thing, can they? No options derived from palettes, what pal­letes are pro­vid­ed are clunky, waste­ful, redun­dent, and look as if they’re from the Windows 95 GUI.

    2. Status bar looks like it is half com­plet­ed. Click arrows look and work in dif­fer­ent ways, leav­ing some use­ful attrib­ut­es out in each.

    INDESIGN HAS, QUARK DOESN’T:

    1. Traaaaansparency! Hello, Quark? ID can apply trans­paren­cy to any thing, from five dif­fer­ent approach­es, EVEN vec­tor EPS’s!

    2. Import of native PSD’s. I know–you say, “low blow,” but not embrac­ing anoth­er devel­op­er’s stan­dards in spite of the needs of your users, when YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE A COMPETING PRODUCT is, well, moronic.

    3. Better (read: bet­ter on a STELLAR lev­el) type and typog­ra­phy control.

19. 

    Mark Evans 27 May 2005

    I total­ly agree with all the com­ments. I’m a senior pub­li­ca­tion spe­cial­ist in our inter­na­tion­al dtp depart­ment. We type­set in numer­ous lan­guages for clients all round the world. Quark 6 has caused us so many prob­lems. It does­n’t sup­port uni­code or Opentype and wont work with any of the lan­guage fonts we use. We are hav­ing to reen­code our fonts so they work in Quark 6 – crazy!
    Many of our big clients have just about had it with Quark and when we show them what InDesign can do their jaws are on the floor. As far as I’m con­cerned Indesign win hands down. If you need to work in a mul­ti­lin­gual envi­ron­ment stay well way Quark, Indesign make the whole process so sweet.

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