On Quark

People who were here from day one, typically do not use Quark -- at least where I'm sitting. They started out with PageMaker because that was the only option. So naturally they upgraded PageMaker instead of buying Quack, despite all the ranting and raving. If you use Photoshop and Illustrator, InDesign is an easy move. I will never use Quack, it's too 'clunky' for me. InDesign, although it has it's issues with speed, *is* a Quack killer.

indesign rules o.k.

i wouldn't use anything else.

Coming from never having had to use Quark, to trying both a year ago in my growing need to tackle page design. And having stacked Quark and InD side-by-side, I would choose InD as it's more intuitive right off the bat. InD is now the app I choose for page layout.

I didn’t appreciate InDesign’s power and ease of use until I had to help a friend out with a Quark project last year. Ouch.

I use Indy for everything from small personal projects to magazines. Any speed issues are negated by its OpenType support.

It’s just too bad that I can’t find a local print shop that uses it—thank god for PDF.

is it just me, or do very few printers in nyc use indesign? Is it the same way everywhere else?

We regularly use 5 different printers here in Salt Lake City. All will accept InDesign files -- some with an annoyed grunt, others with a smile -- but they never been reject them. If a service bureau doesn't accept your file format of choice, don't give them your business. It's only a matter of time before the old-schoolers kick into gear and take InD docs.

InDesign is great. Quark is good at doing the things that it can do okay. But only in System 9. (Remember those 5-or-so years that Quark was stuck at Version 3.2? Those were the bronze days...)

The OpenType functionality alone would make InDesign the choice over Quark, but the other typographic controls are also much smarter in inDesign. (The one thing that infuriates me about Quark is the H&J defaults: word space of 110%. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!)

As I've said before - and I actually did a mini speaking tour on behalf of Adobe, talking about InDesign - is that anything you are used to doing in Quark, you can do in InDesign. It may not be the default option, but hold down a modifier key or two, and you'll get what you want.

The kicker for me, though, is the quality of the PDF files that InDesign generates. And the control that one can exert over the quality of PDFs. Maybe it's because Adobe invented PostScript, and know how to use it, even up to level 3, and Quark is still stuck at level 1.

A fan,
c

PS; Ditto on Stephen's comment about (dis)service bureaux and InDesign. It's a Luddite kneejerk to not take them, although there are issues with InDesign and prepress technologies.

Our printer of choice has a workflow in place which is a few years old, and is not InDesign-friendly. (Did you know that without a plug-in, one can only output one page to film at a time? Not good. But there are new high-end prepress systems that can deal with InDesign better.)

In time, the market saturation and designer demand will make it impossible for bureaux to ignore designer demands.

c

Chester: what you mean, without a plugin, you can't do film output more than one by one?

I have done several film output from my laptop last year, I never encounter any limitations like that with Indy 1.5 or 2.

Jean François, bonjour. Mes amis chez Adobe m'a dit que ce n'est pas possible sans un plug-in qui peut envoyer deux(!) pages. Et que cet plug coute cent dollars. Peut-être, c'est possible avec un RIP qui est plus récent, et le situation chez mon bureau est (extra)ordinaire.
Connaisez-vous le système de RIP utilisé par votre bureau?
Meilleurs, c

J'ai eu une expérience intéressante récemment... I mean, I had an interesting experience recently with Quark and InDesign. I had a Quark document that somehow got corrupted and would crash Quark when you tried to open it. In desperation, I tried importing it into InDesign. It worked perfectly and I was able to finish the job in InDesign.

Those "bronze days" of no upgrades, when Quark rested on their laurels and raked in millions, is what killed the product. Q was and is so far above PageFaker that they thought they'd never have to spend another dime on development. This attitude is evident in the quality of the releases after 3.3. Adobe deserves to be the layout champ once again just for hustle... although I wish they'd just let PageFaker die. It's just so awful.

Chester: The rip is PS 3, Agfa software on Windows server, with Avantra for output, I sent the files from Indesign 1.5 and 2 from Mac 922. Does this help?

I remember to have done also others outputs in 2001, with PS2 rip, with japanese film output (I can recall the name) without problems too.

Mark: You story is really funny! I like it very much. You should send it to Quark guys ;-)

Speaking of printers...

Giles had to actually go into the offices of one of Sarasota's largest printers late last year and install InDesign for them before they would consent to printing a brochure.

Jean François, merci pour les informations. I will send those details to my Adobe contacts and see what they say. It could be that the Level 2 and 3 PostScript RIPs were very happy to handle InDesign files, which are PS3 in InDesign 2, and that you were fortunate to have up-to-date and amenable bureaux.

Amanda, I've had to do the same thing; go over to my bureau with the installer of InDesign. When they were still flustered, I had to generate EPS files which the bureau then placed in Quark files. (Oy vey.)

Of late, I have found that I can make "full" PDF files - with no downsampling or compression - then open those PDFs in Acrobat, then save those files as Encapsulated PostScript, and send the resulting "fat" .eps file to anyone. (Along with the PDF and the INDD, just in case they are residents of the 21st century.) They can place the .eps file in Quark and it RIPs well. Only drawback: no preview, just a grey box.

John, you will pleased to hear that there will be no more versions of PageMaker. This from Adobe. (I remember when PageMaker was an Aldus product, along with FreeHand...)

Best,
c

Using Pagemaker is akin to shaving your balls with a rusty tuna can lid. I haven't tried Quark. (No, not to shave my balls, smartass.)

I'd like to thank Mr Boy for his insight. I'm sure I speak for everyone when I praise him for his piercing observation and eloquence.

Best,
c

B-Boy in the house!

That is a singularly apt analogy, holmes. I remember once getting about 800 PM files from a vendor, and had to do edits on them. Once I discovered that they weren't particularly attached to PM, I spent a week converting them all to Q just for the sake of my poor, battered sanity.

I've posted an entry at this over at Foreword, continuing the discussion....

Well, in spite of the fact that I paid through the *nose* to buy myself a copy of Quark when I first started out in this business, I risked buying a copy of InDesign when it was at 1.0 and brand new, slow, buggy and *terrifyingly* cheap (£99/$150?). To my endless joy, it turned out I preferred it. Therefore, I never upgraded to Quark 4.0 (£400) nor to Quark 5 at a similarly terrifying price -- they keep writing to me. It's rather sweet.

However, I did *immediately* take InDesign immediately to both 1.5 and then to 2, both for what struck me as reasonable amounts of money. But as first and foremost a "typesetter" by nature, and the completely integrated Acrobat PDF features, the tables, the OpenType features -- I'm completely sold on the system and will never, ever go back to Quark barring a miracle. But why, oh why, is OpenType so slow to take off? Other than Adobe themselves, and a token font or two from Emigre, I'm not terribly aware of any other manufacturers doing this. I *want* Small Caps, varieties of figures, Cyrillic, Greek and East European accents built into every font, and I can't understand why others are still happy dealing with SC versions, Expert version, Expert alternatives... etc. Why's it taking so long? Anybody got any information of where to find such sources of new OpenType fonts? Any inside information? I'd be eternally grateful. Best Wishes, Dunx.

It’s sort of a catch 22: Foundries aren’t developing OT fonts because the support isn’t there yet, but if more foundries developed OT fonts and more people wanted to take advantage of OT features, companies would be compelled to build OT support into their applications. I personally would like to see more general support for OT, not just for the design-saavy. It’d be nice if Word supported common “advanced” typesetting features like real small caps and f-ligatures. I never want to see another fake small cap again.

Duncan, until the release of FontLab 4.5, making OpenType fonts was akin to climbing Mount Everest with an elephant in one's pocket. In fact, only the boffins at Adobe and a couple of other places were prepared to make the fonts.

But FL45 makes OpenType coding, previewing, and generation a snap. We've started working with beta fonts in OpenType here at Thirstype, and plan on re-releasing our Nillennium family as OpenType later in the year.

Only problem with OpenType: Quark will probably not support it. Why not? Because it's Quark. (A search of Quark.com for "OpenType" returned little one could call hopeful.) FreeHand MX is also OpenType ignorant. But Illustrator speaks OpenType, so...

All of which to say: There should be many more OpenType fonts on the market soon. Jean François Porchez is, I believe, working on it. (N'est-ce pas?) Jeremy Tankard has published the lovely Aspect with OpenType features a-plenty. (JThe font may be seen at typography.net.)

For more information, check out Eye Magazine 45, with an insightful article by Phil Baines on OpenType.

Colin, I completely agree with you. If I see one more 'small cap' generated à la Quark, using scaling of glyphs, I will... Something. Something bad. Can't think what at the moment.

Best,
c

House Industries also seems dedicated to releasing new type in OT format.

I'm sure that House will very good use of OpenType features. I would love to see some of their script work in OpenType, taking advantage of contextual alternates...

The more foundries releasing fonts in OpenType, the better. It is a great format, and cross-platform too! Who could complain?

Since I'm into non-Latin type, I love OpenType. It's just a huge shame that the axing of sublime MM was made part of the deal. In fact numerous picky Latin typographers would have preferred keeping MM to getting OT.

OT also has the dubious advantage of favoring large font houses, both in terms of technology and the recycling of legacy outlines.

hhp

What I find thoroughly amusing is that no one has yet pointed out this tasty little snippet (taken from http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/):

"The software that sparked a revolution when released in 1987 is today relied upon by millions of users worldwide."

While not 100% accurate, Quark itself does a good job of explaining what exactly is wrong with their flagship piece of software.

Oh, and note to Quark: that Nymphaeaceae spiel might work if your software package was geared towards, say, Cosmopolitan's readership. And they'd still be fairly pissed that your software's as ass-backwards as it has been for the past few versions of the program.

Hrant writes: OT also has the dubious advantage of favoring large font houses, both in terms of technology and the recycling of legacy outlines.

I disagree. If anything, OT favours smaller companies in the process of building up new libraries, who are able to come in on OT on the ground floor. The amount of time and money the large companies are going to need to spend simply on converting their old libraries is substantial. Yes, they can recycle old outlines, but most of them will need to devote considerable resources to expanding character sets, adding ligatures, smallcaps, etc. If they don't do this work, their OT fonts will be less desirable than those of their competitors who do. This is an instance in which being a small, fast and highly manoeuverable jallopy is more advantageous than being a big, lumbering Russian tank :)

I've been making pretty-much nothing but OT fonts for a few years now, and my experience is that they are easier to develop than Type 1, in part because the tools are better now, but also because the reduction of the workflow to a single source and a single binary simplifies so many aspects of development.

Duncan: “I *want* Small Caps, varieties of figures, Cyrillic, Greek and East European accents built into every font, and I can’t understand why others are still happy dealing with SC versions, Expert version, Expert alternatives… etc. Why’s it taking so long?”

Designing a 6 weights family with SC, OsF figures is already long to design with no short term money return, so, just imagine, to design the same 6 weights also with Cyrillic, Greek and whatever you want. It will take me 3x more time. Considering that I try to publish a family by year, perhaps in 3 years, I will be able to finish my first OT family with all what you want.

At the end, all colleagues will perhaps applause the job, but, who will really want to paid this new family three time the usual price ;-)

The problem is not OpenType, the problem is to work 3 time more for same amount of time, and same budget.

Funny how it was.

But indeed, Chester, my next family will be probably OT, with some latin high typography features, CE support but no Cyrillic or Greek support. But, as Jeremy Tankard already done himself last year, I will put on separate PS fonts all alternates, SC and whatever Quark users and their friends can't access when they don't use the lovely Indesign or the new AI 11.

Ok support OT, but not blind of market need.
The last attempt to make an OT version of one of my font for a CE client finally transformed itself as PS font, because the client use so many various software (including one very expensive who begin by X an finish by s) on the mac9 and macX...

John Hudson is already on a world that I never heard about.

Vive OT, vive Unicode, mort à Xpress.

> all colleagues will perhaps applause the job,
> but, who will really want to paid

Exactly a very good point.
I even think smallcaps might fall in that category. Even in the most prominent places (like bronze engravings on prestigious buildings) you see fake smallcaps much more often than the real stuff, even when it's available. And for regular stuff it's as rare as intelligent journalism these days.

hhp

Can InDesign do 6-colour process (or more than 6)?

This is one for the folks at Adobe, but...

InDesign, being 16-bit, still has a difficult time handling fonts, both OpenType and other flavours.

I've been working on a project with my fiancee Tracy - she is in grad school - which is a version of Helvetica Rounded containing dozens of ligatures. Some of the ligatures are automatic, and some are in the font for Tracy to insert at her discretion using the Character Palette.

First note: trying to get glyphs in order in a font in FontLab so that one can control how it looks in the Character Palette has proved impossible. I've gotten close, but have not yet acquired a cigar. The Unicode tables don't seem to match.

Second note: Some of the characters that are in the middle of the Unicode table and the Character Palette are not accessible by InDesign. Notably, Eths, Barred-Ls, and fractions. (Which live under the radar in T1 fonts.) All of these characters are accessible in TextEdit, iTunes, and other 32(?)-bit programs. In fact, I can insert an eth in TextEdit, copy it and paste it in InDesign, then style that eth in InDesign, yet I cannot insert the eth directly.

So. InDesign needs to get fattened up with mo' bits.

In the meantime, one can put huge numbers of alternate glyphs, ligatures, etc. outside of the regular gamut, and OpenType will swap-in those glyphs upon request, but the user can't insert those glyphs upon a whim.

A little frustrating, but workable, and hopefully the next version of InDesign will have more profound bit depth.

Best,
c

Wow! Such eminent people commenting and answering my little postette... I must hang around here more often! You are all most kind.

From what many of you say it sounds like some sort of corner could be turned in the next couple of years, which is great.

And whilst I accept *completely* that creating an OpenType font must take considerably more effort when one is creating them from scratch -- I am full of admiration for *anybody* that can create a beautiful and useable typeface from scratch -- (if Robert Slimbach ever comes in here, can I just put on record my enormous gratitude and admiration for Warnock Pro? Utterly lovely... :-) -- I was really rather thinking of a "back catalogue" sort of affair. I mean we all know that there's Cyrillic, Greek and Small Caps versions of Times around already, but so far as I'm aware, there's not an OpenType version that sticks all the glyphs in the same place for ease of access.

I'm very prepared to be educated again, if someone can correct me. :-)

First note: trying to get glyphs in order in a font in FontLab so that one can control how it looks in the Character Palette has proved impossible. I’ve gotten close, but have not yet acquired a cigar. The Unicode tables don’t seem to match.

Create a custom .enc file for the glyph order you want (see FontLab/Encoding folder).

Use 'Sort glyphs by encoding' function (right mouse click in Font window in Windows; not sure of the Mac).

Ensure that 'Do not re-order glyphs' option is selected in TT export options. Note that this should also apply to CFF OT fonts in latest FL versions.

John, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. I'll try it later. Thank you.
(Hmmmmm... Maybe we should have had this discush over on another site...)
c

More on Quark and InDesign at Daring Fireball today.

Stephen, thanks for help us to comeback to the subject.
To me, the move from Xpress to Indy is like the move from paper to screen (traditional method to the old concept (now) of DTP). It will take very long time. And all bad stories about the advantages of each compared to others will never finish. Does the same people who has been reluctant to move to computer will start again with Xpress?

Funny how everybody in US(?) use the name of a company to describe a product rather is own product name?
Xpress by Quark
Indesign by Adobe

Jean François, c'est un p'tit peu comme "bic" pour un stylo. (En angleterre, un stylo est un "biro", qui est aussi une marque.)

But maybe it's because Quark the company only has one product, and Adobe the company has dozens. If one goes to the Quark website's "products" (yes, my quotation marks are meant to be ironic) section, one is confronted with seven "products", only one of which most of us have ever used. (Unless you're into repurposing your QXP doc into online brochureware, in which case avenue.quark? is the solution for you! And only two hundred bucks.)

Yayzus! I had no idea that QXP costs nine hundred bucks these days. I guess that customers are being asked to pay for Quark's legendary peoduct development. ("Legendary", because it doesn't actually exist.)

Wow. Didn't realise I was feeling so vitriolic this morning. Time for some coffee; that'll calm me down.

c

Here's one thing where Adobe deserves a bad knock regarding InDesign. They pretty much slapped their PageMaker user base in the face in terms of pricing.

Users were paying up to $600+ for a PageMaker license, only to see it turned into a "business publishing" app. If they wanted Indy, they would have to pony up at least $300 to get it, rather than the normal $99 to $150 price for a typical Adobe upgrade.

That might be one reason why "nobody" uses ID. Adobe could have done better. I remember a previous Photoshop upgrade that further offered full versions of Illustrator and PageMaker for $99 each. Perhaps Adobe should consider an aggressive offer on InDesign during the next Photoshop or Illustrator upgrade cycle.

Bobby

You can still get InDesign 2, Illustrator 10, Photoshop 7, and Acrobat 5 for $378 from AcademicSuperstore.com. This has been available for at least six months now.

I’m still experimenting with both: Xpress and InDesign and trying to figure which one should I stick with more closely.
Can anybody tell me if Xpress has optical alignment??? Or is it just that I havent messed with it enough to find it?

Xpress does not have optical alignment. If your work is primarily typographic, there should be no contest: InDesign is light years ahead of Xpress. I tend to agree with Dean Allen's characterisation of Xpress as 'anti-typographic'.

Don't forget the multi-line composer, either. Even with fifteen-year-old Type 1 fonts, the spacing quality of InDesign is unassailable anywhere outside TeX, and even between those two it's pretty close. The easiest way to see this is to set a narrow column of justified type in each app and compare the results.

I'm always happy to see more InDesign converts.

If you know anybody in the Washington D.C. or New Orleans areas who is interested in learning a bit about InDesign, I'm going to be talking at the first D.C. IDUG meeting on May 28, and also at the HOW Design Conference in New Orleans around June 7th or 8th (timing still TBD).

Oops. Not quite specific enough about the topic. I'm talking about advanced typography in InDesign, particularly OpenType goodness.

T

I'm glad to see so many people are able to output from InDesign 2. I have tried unsuccessfully to print proofs from InDesign on numerous occasions. Just printing bombs the program every time on my G4/400. PDF-ing straight from InDesign produces the same result. The only success I have had is with exporting an EPS file, then running that through Acrobat Distiller.

Service bureaus in Seattle are reluctant to take InDesign files, as are printers. I know of a whopping two printers in Seattle who will take InDesign files, but not without cringing. This, in Adobe's back yard.

Don't get me wrong – I like InDesign. I want to see it gain popularity and acceptance. I dislike being forced to use QuarkXpress by magazine publishers, deeply entrenched in the Quark quagmire, who refuse to accept InDesign files. Xpress' interface has always felt archaic to me in comparison to either PageMaker or InDesign.

I'm an old PageMaker user, and InDesign was the next logical choice when PageMaker was no longer being developed. Maybe in another version or two, Adobe will get InDesign right. Maybe printers and publishers will get up to speed with it. In the meantime, I'll be over here relearning to use my T-square and triangle, and trying to find a printer who can accept my flats.