I’m wondering what’s up with the program QuarkXpress. It seems like they became complacent some years ago and have hardly tried to make improvements since.
InDesign is quickly knocking them out of their smug position at the top, and for fair reasons; it’s cheaper and it does more.
Meanwhile, Quark’s newest version has only a couple of new things, including multiple undos and a paste-in-place function - things that other programs have had for ages.
So… is Quark going to fight back? Do they have any big plans for the next version? Will there be a price drop?
Quark is not giving up, but they have a lot of work to do. Quark 7 will evidently offer some new type features that bring it somewhat back into parity with InDesign; whether it will be enough I don’t know, since I don’t work much in DTP anymore. I think their bigger problem is PR-related; lots of people who use Quark have horror stories about trying to get technical support, and as you know, the slow rate of innovation in the software is interpreted by most as laziness and contempt for the users. (They’ve probably suffered more in the Mac community, taking much longer to release a version of Quark for OS X and suggesting, without really saying it, that they’d really appreciate if their users would just switch to Windows already so they’d only have to support one codebase. Mac users don’t care for that suggestion.) Supposedly, they’re also taking steps to put a nice face back on their company as well.
QuarkXPress did everything I wanted/needed it to do back when I was using it to do layout for a weekly newspaper and monthly art periodical.
I can see improvments in regards to support for PNG, UNICODE, or other technical changes that have occurred since then.
Quark traditionally courts the physical media publishers… and checking their website, they still do. So part of their stodgy appearance might stem from the fact that all the flashy cool stuff that’s been made for web publishing has no practical purpose in physical media.
InDesign is made by Adobe… who have had their fingers pretty deep in the internet pie since the beginning. Different markets, different demands, different software.
Quark’s interface sure could use some livening up.
But mostly it’s a bunch of little things that Quark just doesn’t do because it’s stuck in 1994. Little conveniences that other programs have, like being able to paste pictures and EPS files directly into documents, easy drop shadows and other picture effects, picture boxes in any shape imaginable, and so on.
Quark’s a solid program, but it’s taken its position at #1 for years too smugly.
I speak nerd too.
while (QuarkXpress.improvement == “false” && QuarkXPress.price > InDesign.price){
QuarkXpress.popularity –
if (QuarkXPress.popularity == 0)
{
QuarkXPress.throne.usurp == “true”
}
This is bordering on IMHO, but the entire layout/art/graphic design/web design software/hardware/tool market does not follow, in general, basic principles of capitalism. In fact, quality, featuresets, convinience and cost are almost always secondary to fashion, habit and conservatism. QuarkExpress is being used because that’s how it used to be done. Adobe is being used because its the brand, and it has been the brand, and that’s what schools buy, and that therefore makes it better than the competition in every regard, irrefutably. In fact, the entire industry - Autodesk, Adobe, Apple, Quark, and others rely heavily on this fact.
This is why Quark is not changing, still costs $1000 (or whatever it costs right now) and doesn’t NEED to change for quite some time. It works like it worked 10 years ago.
After 10 years as a graphic designer, I could probably fill a library with Quark horror stories. To be perfectly frank, I’m rather relieved to see InDesign capture a bit of the market. In my opinion, it is a far more efficient program and I have yet to experience any of the multitude of pre-press issues that routinely plagued my existence back when I was using Quark.
I’ll echo groman’s sentiment in the sense that Quark managed to maintain such stranglehold on the market for so long due to the its lack of competition and the industry’s dependence on it. All major print shops were, and still are to a lesser extent, equipped to receive Quark files. That’s just the way it was done. As designers, we were content to live with Quark’s various glitches in output because there really wasn’t any other choice. Quark knew this, and obviously grew relatively comfortable with its role as the sole provider of adequate page layout software. Now that Adobe has put out a competitive product capable of rivaling Quark, I think they’re starting to feel the pressure. The problem is that they are competing with a software company that has relative control over the market in vector illustration and photo editing, which gives it a natural edge in compatibility. InDesign can also open up Quark files with a fair amount of ease, which gives Quark all the more reason to worry.
Adobe and Macromedia have been doing a similar dance for years as well. In the early days, Macromedia attempted to market a product that could compete with Photoshop called XRes. It didn’t even come close to catching on. Freehand has its niche, but is outperformed by Illustrator in almost every way. Similarly, Adobe’s attempts to horn in on the interactive/web-development market with GoLive and LiveMotion have been less than successful. Between Adobe and Macromedia, the full spectrum of print, web, interactive, and motion design is more or less covered. Thus far, Quark has relied on the fact that the industry has used its product for so long that they are reluctant to use anything else. However, I think they recognize that this will not last. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing some major changes to the software pretty soon.
I do very little work with publishing programs like Quark, but earlier this year I did have to use it for a couple projects. The lack of features was really annoying! It didn’t do things that I remember Ventura Publisher (circa 1986) did.
I despised using Quark, and I’m glad there’s competition there now.
Basically: Quark is nice if you have a hard time learning new programs or if it’s required by your printer/job. Otherwise, InDesign is the way to go due to its greater ease of use and features.
Here’s a question from me: I do most of my design work in Illustrator, so to make it compatible with any printer, I just change everything to outlines and email it where it needs to go. I imagine that the only thing keeping a printer from using .indd files is that they don’t have InDesign. In that case, why couldn’t I bust out a .pdf and send it to them?
And that bought out my inner nerd, so I wrote this in Flash Actionscript:
while (QuarkXpress.improvement == “false” && QuarkXPress.price > InDesign.price){
QuarkXpress.popularity –
if (QuarkXPress.popularity == 0)
{
QuarkXPress.throne.usurp == “true”
}
}
It means:
While QuarkXpress doesn’t improve, and while QuarkXPress costs more than InDesign, Quark’s popularity will go down.
If Quark’s popularity reaches 0, InDesign will usurp it’s throne.
Sorry, but for all of this discussion about publishing software, I just don’t see what the big deal is. I mean, Word, Open-Office, anything has text boxes and lots of pretty fonts, right? So who gives a damn about spending $1,000 for QuarkXPress, InDesign, or any other piece of “layout software.” I mean, it all seems pretty basic to me.
The inablity of a typesetting machine to carve woodcuts is not a shortcoming of the typesetting machine. And the inability of the guy that makes woodcut illustrations to run a typesetting machine isn’t one of his shortcomings. I’m a big fan of having a bunch of small specialized programs each of which do a specific thing well over a large bloated program that does all sorts of things (most of which I don’t use or need), but doesn’t do many of them very well. I also really like plug-in architecture as a compromise between those extremes.
If someone wanted any kind of wacky cool effects on their image, I’d tell them to do it in an image editor (imagine that) and send it back to me when they were done… at which point I’d drop it in as a plain vanilla image.
I don’t recall it being terribly difficult to get images into the layout (create a box, pick the file you want in the box, done). I do recall getting some non-compatible file formats from advertisers from time to time. We’d usually open them in an image editor and save them as a file type Quark could use. A hack, and yes, it would be better if they supported the file type. EPS looks like it’s also for “drop-in” type layout elements.
I never actually used it in production work, but playing around I do recall that you could get text to flow around an oddly shaped element. It wasn’t default behaviour and required some hand tweaking if you wanted it to look a specific way, but it could be done. But, like I said, I never had to do it with real work.
Keep in mind I haven’t used anything else (unless handcoding webpages counts), so I don’t really have an opinion on how it compares to the competition. I’m just sayig the last time I used it it, I thought it was a mature and robust program that could do what I needed it to do.
I think it’s high time for this post to move over to In My Humble Opinion.
When you’re going to print stuff off of your own printer, Word and everything else is fine, but there are a lot of things they just won’t do/settings they don’t have when it comes to printing on presses. When my work gets Word files, we end up making them into PDFs in the end annd placing them in Quark to print. The outcome is more predictable that way.
Word is not a layout program, was never meant to be a layout program, and never will be a layout program. Thank og.
Quark is a heavy hitter for laying out print material. We’re talking magazines, catalogs, books, brochures… shoot anything that would require intricate design, and customized layouts, page sizes, spot colors, the list is endless.
You can’t set up a tri-fold 4"x8.5", die-cut, 5-color (process + one spot) brochure, with several hundreds of megabytes worth of imported imagery… not to mention the fine-tuned typography one could get into to not only save time, but have it look the way intended… in Word. Let alone print separations.
Oy.
Anyway, for us designers that have been around since the beginning, Quark has fallen behind the 8-ball. After using InDesign it just makes Quark look sad. Granted, Quark is very powerful and once you know how to use it, you can get pretty efficient in it, but it’s interface can be quite stifling. Shoot, I don’t even really take advantage of most of the newer, fancier features of InDesign, but it is a much more graceful program, with some very real advantages over Quark, that makes you wonder if Quark is even paying attention, or cares.
Tragic, really, because they should be much farther along than where they’re at now. Just shows what no real competition for too long will do to a company.
I know, I know. Sorry to take my aggression out on ya. It’s just that I deal with this kind of thinking quite often from even those in my company that don’t realize what this stuff takes, and they think because they are efficient in Word, they’re designers.
Also, the emailing of jpeg images imbedded in a Word document is beyond annoying. Why-oh-why do they do that? sobbing WHY?
It’s basically a difference between, well, do I want a piece of software where I have control over absolutely every part of the layout or do I want to save several hundred dollars but spend several hundred hours trying to figure out how to replicate the functionality of that $1000 software.
I will be willing to bet that for any book/magazine you would want to lay out, I will be able to do it quicker, have it look better and have no compatability issues with the printer with InDesign than you would be able to with Word.
Most print shops these days are equipped to receive PDF’s for final output. The Flightcheck software used by most print shops can utilize a PDF just as easily as it could a .qxp or .indd file. I never thought it would be that easy until a printer I was working with said that a .pdf would be fine. It seems as though there are a lot of printers who don’t know about this either, so they stick to the standard format.
