Quark Taking A Dive

On the ropes?! Not in my mac.

I understand your allegiance to the old standby, John. I was a Quarker for 5 years. It’s sturdy and it’s proven. But there is so much it can’t do.

Give InDesign a decent try. As a print designer I use it every day and I haven’t launched Quark in months. Unlimited undos is reason enough to switch.

Unlimited undos is reason enough to switch.

not to mention typographic control equal to that in xpress (better if you're talking about opentype on 10.2), an easier-to-understand interface, cut-and-paste between illustrator, import and true-color printing of layered photoshop files, XML support, native PDF export, and an easier-to-swallow pricetag.

always hated xpress, haven't used it in years. probably won't again.

It is not quite fair to call a Quark Deathwatch a case of Schadenfreude because there is nothing shameful about it.

I feel vaguely vindicated that I never learned Quark because we now have a superior tool available, the venerated Indy, which I am slowly learning as a replacement for antediluvian PageMaker skills. I feel like a Third World country that skipped widespread landline telephones and went straight for wireless.

Die, Quark, die.

after a very brief experiement with ID, Quark felt like a return to the stone age of computers. the controls, interface, and preview quality put QXP to shame. besides, we have a fair amount of evidence that Adobe is comitted to Mac development when it comes to serious design tools.

a few weeks ago i spoke to someone who had to use indesign as per client's request (?), and he said he'd never use qxp again. along with the comments of a few people on this very thread whose opinions i trust, i reckon i should give it a try. the only thing that scares me is adobe's complete dominance once id takes over. microsoft junior anyone?

Keep Quark on all your machines that are too old to run InDesign, but do catch Apple's Free-ID-2.0-with-every-PowerMac before it expires. I think that's the end of this month.

If that's not enough, the machines built after 1 January won't boot into 9.x either. Perhaps this will make the prices of older Macs go up?

I also went from PageMaker directly to InDesign. I tried Quark a few times, and yes, it did trump PageMaker. But InDesign 2.0? No way.

Of course, there's always that other choice. Or that other other choice.

I have to say that designers are caught between a stone and a hard place.

I've given ID many shots. It's integration with the adobe product line is excellent.... can I say key commands!? WOW.....

but also...it is horribly slow loading hi-res images. Maybe InDesign 3 will be what knocks Quark off...but until then...Quark unfortunately still has it's place.

I really do wish InDesign would become a serious contender. I want to leave Quark sooo bad.

John...FRAMEMAKER??? COREL????

Not in the professional realm.

the only thing that scares me is adobe's complete dominance once id takes over. microsoft junior anyone?

You must remember the important thing that seperates Microsoft from Adobe. Microsoft does not innovate nor does it provide quality products, never has, never will. They dominate the market that allows companies like Adobe to run software on Microsoft operating systems. They have no need to innovate, not now at least.

ALL CAPS?!?! TOO MUCH CAFFEINE?!!

Those two mentions were mainly tongue-in-cheek. But perhaps they shouldn't be. There are in fact some serious outfits that use both of them. Do not assume that software you don't use personally isn't used by other professionals.

FrameMaker's advantages are technical documents and SGML. Particularly for technical documents, your choices are primarily FrameMaker and TeX. There are still serious outfits that use TeX as well and even publish beautiful books with it.

There is also still a large base of Ventura users. (Law publishers, I think.) Corel has maintained a pretty good hold on the sizable demographic that needs serious publishing tools but hates Macs and the Mac User Archetype.

Eric:

What innovations has Adobe brought about lately? Indesign was only created to compete directly with Quark (since pagemaker was so bad).

I've been rather dissappointed in Adobe's and Macromedia's offerings lately.

Is anyone using the new Corel or Stone Design products?

Microsoft does not innovate nor does it provide quality products, never has, never will.

Take a look at the dozen or so Arabic, Indic, and Asian fonts that ship with Windows XP, and you might begin to understand how half a hemisphere might disagree with that.

Microsoft R&D has been churning out some rather impressive technologies in the past few years. Notice how OpenType, the C# language, and .NET have all been embraced by the traditionally anti-Microsoft open source community.

They seem to be getting a few things right if you ask me.

I've used Quark exclusively in 3 separate prepress positions for over 9 years (after abandoning PageMaker in '93, around the time Adobe acquired it). Would I switch to a superior product? Sure, especially if I can safely import all my Quark files. Most shops are still very much married to Quark, if only because that's the format all the repeat clientele's files are saved in.

As far as Quark not being able to do certain things very well, you'd have to qualify that; over the years I've seen evidence suggesting that most people using Quark really don't know how to use it all that well.

check out my school, where a lot of the people who come to the first year don't know much of applications, try learning them Quark when they know Photoshop/Illustrator and see a copy of InDesign 2 ready to use.
No one uses Quark, only if the printshop can't handle it, and then we just export as PDF or EPS (and paste it in quark)..
Quark just lacks a proper interface that works as fluent with other programs as InDesign, especially for the new breed of users.

Even though Quark is the industry standard (still), it will soon be over when printers support PDF to the fullest or directly support InDesign.

At work we know hand over only PDF's, where a year ago it had to be Quark or EPS when it was only a poster or something.

I only feel InDesign is still too slow, as mentioned before, especially when doing a magazine/book project. And I have a very fast, boosted up machine...

first off, I never emerged myself in Quark too much; at this point, I think this is turning out as a benefit, as I'm about to take the plunge into InDesign with know Quark Quirks&trademark; holding me back. What I've seen so far has made me love it.

A point though, about innovation. There's two kinds of innovation in the software biz, as far as I can tell: 'Hey look! We're innovating' (marketing) and actual innovation. Don't confuse one with the other. The status as far as I'm concerned:

Microsoft:
Love them, hate them, but their 'Hey look' 'innovations' (XP) aren't half bad. Granted, Windows 9X was a joke and to be considered a serious OS, Windows should've been NT-kernel based from the get-go (a la NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP). In the meantime.. good 'real' innovations: ClearType, OpenType, and I'm sorry, but IE5.X (and 6) on PC redefined what people expected from a solid webbrowser.

Quark:
Can you say major ball-droppage? These people have dillusions of grandeur that will kill them along the line. Meanwhile, the industry suffers from their backwards logic and tantrums. Innovations? XML integration, perhaps. HTML output? Haha. Anybody who designs websites with a too much of a print-paradigm is shooting him/herself in the foot, anyway. Print influence is good, but making webstuff in Quark? Quark Inc appears to have a '96 mindset.

Adobe:
Multiple personalities. On one side, insane OS X adoptation (which is a Good Thing). One the other, slightly odd descisions like 'No ATM for OS X'. On the whole though, they make me happy. They might be Microsoft Junior, but admit it, they've made products allow them a bit of arrogance.

Macromedia:
Ball dropper #2! Mac versions are still sub-par and OS X development is outsourced to India. That last thing might not be bad, but only time will tell (Director MX was ported in India).

Anybody have experience with Stone products?

Sending the coding overseas is a great idea.

hhp

hrant,

i'm all there for sending the code overseas. but developing the PC version stateside and then shipping off said code to be ported to Mac as an afterthought.. I don't know if that's a good thing.

You're right: it should all be done in Bangalore. Or Kiev. Or Yerevan. Anywhere there's a good programmer base and a knowledge of English.

hhp

Someone told me that Quark 6 is due out early next year. Maybe it will be a huge leap from 5. Has anyone heard about new features or release dates??

Jidoe - One of the key points of the NMR article I point to is that there is still no release date.

“Everyone was stunned, and most folks left by noon,” one attendee reported. “It was awful.” Although many of Quark’s hapless visitors were lured to the gathering by a promised demo of XPress for Mac OS X, Quark provided precious few details and no time line.

"Someone told me that Quark 6 is due out early next year. Maybe it will be a huge leap from 5."

Ha Ha!!! It took years for them to give us 5 and it WAS expected that it would update it thoroughly. NOPE.

Shortly after they release 5, they talk of 6. There is no way it will be any huge leaps made. BTW.. I say "shortly" according to Quark's weird sense of timing of releases.

Peace
mGee

One of the weirder events of the past few years involved Quark attending a Unicode conference in order to make the announcement that they did not intend to implement Unicode. Very strange company. Very stupid decision.

Sorry, I was a bit confused about "Quark for OSX". I didn't think that the article was refering to version 6, silly me.
As a graphic design student, I felt I needed to learn Quark in order to survive in the industry. Esentially I was forced into learning Quark. I'm not so crazy about the program, and hope to learn to use InDesign in the next 6 months, using my Quark skills only when necessary.
I predict that bureaus (etc.) will not switch for at least 5 years.

Not to doubt the overall stupidity of Quark, but I think that particular move might have actually been pretty smart: if you're not planning on supporting something while your competitor is, it makes sense to discourage user expectation as much as possible! :-/ My guess is they were basically trying to convince the "undecided" conference attendees not to make the jump to Unicode.

hhp

"C# language, and .NET have all been embraced by the traditionally anti-Microsoft open source community."

Huh? I can't say I know of any open source proponents who are praising C# and .NET.

Yea, .NET is nice but not a new concept and C# is just MS not wanting to support the already established Java.

But now we're digressing... ;o)

Back to Quark. Quark is a very arrogant company that abhors change.

Obviously, they're still in business, so it can be argued that their customer base is also somewhat arrogant and abhors change. ;o)

Huh? I can't say I know of any open source proponents who are praising C# and .NET.

What.. you mean like Ximian/Gnome's Miguel de Icaza working on the Mono project, an effort to create an open source implementation of the .NET Development Framework?

I'd say that fits the bill.

My guess is they were basically trying to convince the "undecided" conference attendees not to make the jump to Unicode.

Then they seriously misjudged. I doubt if there are many seriously undecided people attending Unicode conferences these days. In the early days, back when there was one conference per year, a large amount of explanation and persuasion was on the agenda. These days, the conferences happen twice a year to meet the international demand for information on the standard, and the focus is very much on implementation. Even the pre-conference tutorial sessions are leaning more and more toward implementation topics rather than 'What is Unicode and why is it good for you?'

In my business, Corporte ID, we need to make files that are usable by printers Worldwide. We also need files that are very reliable and not too fussy. A lot of the InDesign features don't help us. I like Quark and am dispointed by there reluctance to 'get it'. Remember QuarkImmedia? That is what Quark 5 reminds me of. Unless I'm just a dabbler I'm gonna use web design software to design a web site. I don't want one piece of software that does all things. I want software that does that task I put to it really well. So far for design and layout of templates for print that software is QuarkXPress.

Brendan deVallance

I've been using Indesign on a daily basis for over a year now. I used it in conjunction with Pagemaker and Quark for the first few months, and now rely on it for almost anything longer than a single page. Forget the fact that type support is infinitely better on page and in terms of interface than anything you can get with Quark; forget that the transparency, output, and artwork-support features are better. Forget that, at least on my dual g4, it runs about three times as fast, and forget about beautiful smooth native osx support. What I like about it, aside from all these things, are that it generates the neatest, tightest, most beautiful and clean PDFs I've ever seen from any document, and the seamless XML support. I can honestly say that Indesign has made my life easier: it's eliminated problems I've had to invent shortcuts around with Quark and other applications for years, and I have not once had any kind of significant problem with the application or any document I created with it.

>In my business, Corporte ID, we need to make files that are usable by printers Worldwide.

? Please explain? Quark don't support international hyphenation as Indesign do. Or its quite recent thing. Just try to ask a French or Spanish or German printer to do output from Xpress US. Don't work.

But work with Indesign. And with Indesign you can open 99% of the Xpress files, Not the case with a version of Xpress who can’t open any others Xpress files.

I love QuarkXPress so much, it is hard to put into words.

I was once there, Ben. But InD will render you speechless.

Im going to have to agree with darryl, In my experience I think the only people I have found that still work in quark is mac users that are afraid to chang with the times. I'm quite against the mac platform myslef, but thats a whole different can of sh*t. :)

"is mac users that are afraid to chang with the times"

It's not even a 'mac user' thing. Many graphic desingers learn QuarkXPress and that's all. I've worked in large design firms where a majority of the print designers have learned no computer skills beyond XPress and the occasional photoshop filter. Just getting these people to understand the concept of file extensions was difficult.

Quark has done so well because they were the defacto application in more Design firms and print shops. They didn't need to innovate since they had the market share and that particular market wasn't keen on switching to competitors. Lazy customers are ideal in the software biz. ;o)

If they were smart, they'd close shop and call it good. They really have no place to go now except down.

BTW, if your print shop only takes XPress files, then it's time to find a new printer. (Hey! Printers! One word: PDF!)

More commentary on QXP vs. InD at Speak Up.

After reading this foot-long column of mostly like-minded commentary, I am moved to present (hopefully) one more nail in the QX coffin.

I have worked in printing, design and service bureaus from the days of the old CompSet 500's, Linotronics, etc. and have output to film from most pro and consumer apps. We used to (at one shop) even use Freehand to completely render, layout and output to RIP start-to-finish (to not have to use QX). Xpress was decently stable crash-wise but after using ID I'll not go back. I mean, come on - granted, most folk learned on the beast, so most of the world uses it now - but all the typesetters I ever met used it because they HAD TO to be compatible with the world. And key commands?! Learn all the other apps and they are mostly similar - but NOOOO...QX's are ass-backwards (talk about compatibility with the rest of the world) - Who do they think they are?!

One more tidbit before I sign off - A Mac salesman said the other day that apparently all these years Quark has been putting their eggs in Win platform R&D and is abandoning Mac OS altogether (meaning NO forseeable X version after Spring), hence Apple giving free ID2.0 with the new Macs. So screw them. Abandoning the Mac user after we bought and used their piece of aggravating crap for so long.

...don't sound bitter, do I?

I've never been that attached to Quark since I first learned to make page layout on PageMaker, but after hearty use of both QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign over the years, I can safely say I'm pro-InDesign. ID has at least 90% of all of Quark's capabilities (my biggest gripe is that you can't merge or split path shapes, but I'll attribute that to Adobe wanting me to buy Illustrator in addition to ID), and it is completely functional and a dream to use, compared to the "try to recall how you did it last time" interface of Quark.

I wouldn't toss out Quark quite yet, but I suggest that all designers should switch to InDesign if they haven't already.

Okay I started out (many moons ago) learning pagemaker and thought "s'allright". Then I was bundled onto to quark and with a brief intro took to it to like a duck to water.
It felt like a good way of putting stuff together on a computer.

F-fwd to indesign and I gave it a go. Not the same experience at all.
Was it a miraculous new way of doing the above? No, it felt a bit wierd and clunky. The result of needing an interface that didn't breach quark's copyright/patent rather than an interface that is a better way of doing it.
Did my considerable expertise in illustrator and photoshop help? No. Stuff didn't seem to carry over (copydrag anyone?). It didn't feel faster than quark and just left me thinking "er no. Maybe next time"
Quark has many many failings but many of the arguments in favour of ID seem to be along the lines of "I like it cos it isn't Quark".
Not good enough.
The basic premise of Quark's object boxes to me is a good one. If Adobe had any sense they'd try really hard to buy Quark, absorb its strengths and spit out the weaknesses.

The main thing preventing me from trying out InDesign isn't my Mac-based "fear of change" (everyone knows that's a platform issue), but the sluggish, miserable performance of Illustrator 10. Although the XPress interface is a disgrace, I wonder if the time I save on Indesign's interface will be lost as I wait for redraw, start-up etc. But Mr Ebrahimi's outburst is no surprise: I used to go to their Service Plus Conferences (where their richest clients who PAID for service were invited), and he used to have at least a couple of rants over the course of the week if someone asked for something that a) might cut into his margins or b) put his customers' needs first. Tim Gill (the inventor of XPress itself) was usually the countering voice of reason, insofar as his priority was great software, but now he's taken his money and gone snowboarding. A shame.

Marko, this here blog is called "typographica", not "prettylayoutica". Context is everything, and in this context of type, InDesign simply does text justice, while XPress [mis]treats it like a image.

hhp

"InDesign simply does text justice, while XPress [mis]treats it like a image." Hear, hear! Ligature support and Indy's customizable hyphenation controls alone make it vastly superior. And the ability to insert all different widths of spaces (both breaking and non-breaking) from the menu is great. There were obscure keyboard commands to insert n-spaces, non-breaking spaces, &c in Quark, but they didn't even work.

And speaking of needing to produce files for international clientele, surely Indy's ligature and Unicode support puts Quark to shame.

Paul

Hrant, I love the "prettylayoutica!" Someone should start that blog!

To add another 2 cents: We've switched because Indy produces better-looking output. Period. We still have Quark 4 for those clients that insist -- but don't use it nearly as much....

Oh, and the X support is nice. No more Classic!

...and as far as Pagemaker goes, I think we can all agree its type handling abilities are poor, its penchant for postscript errors and other output problems very high, its inability to work with many higher-end output devices infuriating, its pdf support disgraceful and its general stability disappointing. Does anyone even actually use it, besides desktop publishers working on company newsletters (nothing wrong with that of course)?

Yeah, I was a desktop publisher working on a company newsletter, so I learned on PageMaker and set my first few books in it. Then I learned Quark when I started working for another designer, but I've always loathed that program. It's a buggy, awkward piece of crap.

Last fall I went to one of those all-day Adobe "seminars" where they try to wow a couple hundred people into buying the program. I was an easy sale: most of the presentations showed how to do godawful things with transparency, but when they showed the slider control between "better spacing" and "fewer hyphens," I fell in love.

Now I use InDesign for any file I don't have to share with someone else--that's the only drawback, for me: nobody I work with has InDesign, so if someone else needs to edit the file directly, I have to create it Quark. The printers I work with don't mind .indd files, and everyone loves a well-made PDF.

InDesign's text handling saves me a lot of work while giving more control and better results. I have to admit that it's slower than Quark on my machine--most OS X programs are--but hey, at least it doesn't crash all the time, taking my work with it. The seconds I lose to spinning beach balls are returned to me in the form of less time mindlessly clicking.

In short, Die, Quark, die.