Considering InDesign’s native .psd and .ai importing, dramatically smaller file sizes and lower RAM requirements, is it even a competition anymore? Can Quark, the once undisputed KING of layout, regain it’s title? Is there anything left that Quark does better?
Quark will be relegated to the confines of the Catalog niche. They killed themselves, they were the 800 pound Gorilla of the page layout world, and they acted like it? Need support? Too bad. Need a salesperson? Boo-friggen-hoo. Want to have a feature that is desperately need in our next release? Piss-off.
After I had converted 200 machines over to ID from Quark, and Quark finally saw the writing on the wall, did I get a call from a rep.
And on top of that, Adobe had been really releasing some good stuff. I am annoyed that they are hell bent on releasing a new version every year. Was CS2 really worth the price of an upgrade?
But I don’t think Quark is dead. It will continue to lose market share, and eventually be only relevant to the catalogue niche, but I haven’t seen Adobe’s catalog features to be much of a threat. Not yet at least.
I still prefer Quark, but mainly because it’s familiar and because it works with our ripping software (RAMpage). InDesign can’t have tiffs with bleeds and work with our software, the bleeds vanish. InDesign CS2 files don’t work at all, but this is mostly the fault of RAMpage needing to upgrade. Overall, I know that InDesign is better, but the industry hasn’t caught up with it yet.
As with anything, the larger/more powerful company (Adobe) will gradually edge Quark out, year after year. Quark still has the opportunity to regain market share, but I think their attitude has scaed off many potential customers.
I have to agree with the CS2 version of inDesign though, i saw mainly minor differences, at least illustrator cs2 had some ui revamps, along with a few new features that may prove helpful from time to time. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with adobe’s software like goLive and imageready since they’ve obtained macromedia.
This is a case of the larger company actually making a better product, though. What prompted me to make this thread is that I was recently handed the early draft of a big project started in QuarkXPress. I mostly quit using QuarkXPress around version 4 because InDesign was simply better. I still use QuarkXPress occassionally, like when I take over a project; but damned if I’m not tempted to redo the whole damn thing in InDesign. If the deadline wasn’t so close, I probably would.
Little things make such a difference, too. Like placing images. Ctrl-D and place the image in InDesign and use keyboard shortcuts to resize proportionally. I don’t have to make an image box, then place it then made manual adjustments to resize and keep proportional.
What if you want to update the original file? Right click, choose edit original in InDesign and the original file opens in the correct program. In Quark you have manually chose the app and browse to the file, make changes (if the original is .psd or .ai, then you have to save the copy in a Quark usable format). It’s automatically updated when you save and go back to InDesign. In Quark, go to utilities, images, update, okay to update.
I could go on; but then it turns into a rant.