In my summary I thought Quark 6 was far to basic and dated to compete with Indesign.
Quark 7 was a vast improvement but still didn’t cut it for me with the features of Indesign.

However I have been using Quark 8 now for the last 3 weeks and have been totally bowled over by it.
The tools are on another level and bar a couple of small tweeks I would be happy to say its a far, far better product than Indesign CS3.

Stable, intuitive and actually fun to use (for a change).

I worked as a senior graphic designer at a major University. I lived and breathed Quark. We used Quark and it was fine (in the 90’s), except when something went wrong and you needed customer service… Quark service sucked big time!

Never again will I be subject to their ‘customer service’.

But let’s hope Quark doesn’t die completely: Adobe Indesign needs a bit of competition to keep them on their toes or they might become complacent like Quark did! (I hope not).

Is there a tutorial on HOW TO DO TEXT RUNAROUND somewhere out there??

I’m getting desperate!

Looks very interesting, well worth a look… and I for one think it’s a great thing that there are 2 DTP apps out there!

Freehand is no more despite there being a huge user base!

first thing i noticed, was that when i print something, it doesn’t look like it did on the screen. I don’t just mean the colors either, pictures get chopped off, characters show up out of nowhere etc.

The next i notice is that the damn thing crashes if you look at it the wrong way. i started to keep a log of the crashes and in one week i had over 70!

This is quite possibly the worst program i have ever been forced to use. Don’t buy it!

I don’t care how bad Quarks customer service is…I can’t remember the last time I had to call them…either way, I don’t depend on anyone’s customer service.

It seems designers got all giddy over InDesign for one main reason…it said Adobe on the box…dang followers. InDesign may have “arrived,” but in the form of a sputtering Pinto with a different name and a CD player.

-Carlito

Our experience is the opposite. Our productivity improved after moving from QXP 6.5 to ID CS2 (we are now on CS3).

It’s just too bad it takes twice as long to produce something in ID than it does in Quark.

And guess what? If I wanted to use Aldus PageMaker all over again I would use ID CS3.

Great program, needs an 8-core minimum with 16 gigs of RAM.

For those of you too young to know Adobe is going the way of Corel DRAW; too many features for one program to do effectively. Granted, at least in ID everything works.

Adobe should come out with its own OS…

I just bought a new Intel/imac running leopard 10.5 to find out Quark 7 is the only version
that will run in leopard and the assholes at the apple store said it would run fine with a free 7.3.1 upgrade form Quark web site.

THIS IS TOTAL BULLSHIT!!!!!!!!

IT DOSE NOT RETAIN THE HIGH-RES PREVIEW SETTING!!!!

and this is a big problem designers.

I can not sit down with my client to do changes
on his 50 page catalog with over 1000 images
and have it open up with all LOW-RES crappy
looking images.. i am installing indesign now!

I need a new job (that doesn’t require use of Quark)

A funny note from an executive insider at Quark. While employees are jumping ship left and right including Quark’s CFO, two key Marketing Directors, and even their well-loved receptionist of many years, you can still find love within the walls of Quark HQ. After a secret six month courtship, Quark Senior Marketing VP Terry Welty has proposed marriage to infamous Quarkalliance diva, Cyndie Shaffstall. Even though his divorce is still pending he announced to senior management that he’s found the woman of his dreams. It’s comforting to know that even a dysfunctional company such as Quark, love can prevail.

VJ

Far from bashing ID, I admitted that it will probably become the new industry leader — I just found it to be a little ‘bloated’ with features that I found unnecessary when compared to a older, stable version of Quark.

I no longer ‘dislike’ InDesign, but I still stand by my original point — it’s a shame that Quark is no longer what it used to be.

The fact of the matter is, yes, InDesign can do X, Y and Z AND for the most part do it better and with less steps than QXP.

Us “new-school” designer embrace technology. When something better comes out, we learn it and use it to our advantage. Don’t bash software because you don’t feel like learning something new.

At the time the only real competition I can remember was Pagemaker which very few design houses used. Consequently graphics courses were forced to use Quark. So you’d think they’d acknowledge this fact with educational pricing and support.
Wrong.
Price concessions were pathetic to non-existant and to this day I have yet to find a company with more arrogant and ignorant customer support.

In the early days of CAD I remember Autodesk almost gave away AutoCAD to some colleges. So when students graduated, companies getting into CAD for the first time would buy the full price software knowing they could find operators. I wish Adobe would do something like this with InD and finish off Quark for good.

Looks like nothing has changed with Quark over the years. I thank goodness I’m not involved in pre-press any longer.

Perhaps we should have a word with Mr. Adobe. He could do to Quark what he did to my beloved Freehand (sobs).

[To begin, I have to say that some of the early comments on this page are useless — it’s only about half-way down that we get some constructive arguments.]

I’ve been in graphic design and pre-press for close to 15 years now, and Quark Xpress was my best friend — it actually focussed on the important aspects of typesetting, such as leading and paragraphs. It was so simple, professional and uncluttered that only about 12 months ago did I make the change from Quark 4.1 (in Classic) to the “new” Quark 6.2.

What a terrible shame. Instead of strengthening the important ‘old-school’ abilities of the program, they instead tried to make it a complete ‘even secretaries can use it’ design package, including web design. I think this is what made them lose their way.

And for this reason, I didn’t like InDesign either. It’s too easy for any old joe to make a semi-professional looking design… even though a document is only as good as the designer. And there’s the problem, as someone else pointed out earlier — the old school designers (of which I class myself as, not to the point of sticking with Quark for the sake of it though!) are probably a dying breed. It’s sad that the new-wave designers probably have no idea about leading, kerning, trapping, bleeds, etc…

Anyway, to wrap this wandering comment up, I’ll say that I hope Quark finds its feet again, since we do need competition in the industry… but until then, I’ll begrudgingly teach myself InDesign and wish that it had half the professional, old-school type tools that Quark has. And easier colour and object managing.

I hope Quark won’t always suck.

Our office is thinking of making the switch from Quark to Indesign (and mac to PC for that matter).

With that, a few questions:

- As it is now, our office must use both Macs and PCs (yes odd I know, but just go with it), ff we continue to use both and would like to install Quark or Indesign on BOTH systems, would we be able to move back and forth on the same document between the systems?

- What about transferring all of our old Quark documents into Indesign, can that be done? Or if we do swith to solely PCs, could we transfer a Mac quark document to a PC quark document?

Any responses would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Paul-
Yeah, I’m still amazed at how many designers do not take advantage of automated actions in Adobe products. I can’t say enough about automation, batching, and droplets. It saves me from insanity! Or, it saves the poor interns from insanity!

She got the text from the editor. It was a list of museums. The only manual part was going to each museum name and then replacing the “; ” with a paragraph return (in CS3 I think I could have automated this action). So now we have an article and the paragraphs follow this pattern:
-Museum name
-Museum location
-Museum description

She then did a search and replace to apply a character style to all italicized text. She then created a paragraph style for each type of paragraph.

Then she selected all of the text to apply paragraph style using next paragraph style option. The correct style was automatically applied to each paragraph in the article.

She then did a Find and Replace to find all semi-colons in the paragraphs marked as museum location and to replace them with ” |” with the proper character style applied.

I haven’t tried doing something like with with QXP 7.2, but I haven’t been able to do something like this with QXP 6.5 and earlier.

Note that the above did not depend on drop shadows or any eye-candy, just basic mechanics for getting things done. My designer will now have more time to do design work (by working with the style sheets) than if she had to do all of the above by hand.

DESCRIPTION – Answering phone, customer service, assist with payroll, data entry, attention to detail, goal oriented. Must know MS Office, Photoshop and Illustrator, FLash a plus. Also highly preferred if you know how to operate a forklift.

LOL I’m qualified for that job!

HEADLINE – Graphic Designer

DESCRIPTION – Answering phone, customer service, assist with payroll, data entry, attention to detail, goal oriented. Must know MS Office, Photoshop and Illustrator, FLash a plus. Also highly preferred if you know how to operate a forklift.

LOL, chrome logo anyone?

You are soooooo correct. Adobe feels they can make a designer out of the receptionist - just make the ‘effects’ easy to access and you are off to the races…

Overall I don’t think this is an issue with serious designers. It’s probably become more noticeable because there’s many so called “designers” that just know how to use the program but are not really designing. Although, I think logo design has reached a low point. But again, this is most likely due to the same reason. If I see one more chrome logo I’m going to be sick.

I do not understand why file formts and color management and font management are big questions marks for you. We never had problems in those areas.

One key for use was to set up a PDF workflow when we used QXP 4. Once we did that we were in position to work with any program to make files for our printer.

Trying investing 15 - 18 years of experience and then chucking it because of industry ‘trends’. I state this because XPress, for better or worse still works. And yes, eventually something will come along and blow InDesign out of the water. You, the user, will be forced to to dump the equity in your expertise and start again.

InDesign is targeted at what you see on screen - not on press. XPress was/is presscentric. Ink and paper.

Just because Adobe insists you need a new upgrade, doesn’t mean you should have to relearn the entire concept of postscript and printing.

The waters have never been muddier in terms of what file formats to use with InDesign, color management, font management are all big question marks - bigger question marks than they were in 1995.

Progress for the sake of progress?
I want to concentrate on design and creative, not reading manuals and blogs about HOW to get the software to play along.

Software is a tool, not the solution. In my professional life, I have found the software more specifically, the Creative Suite concept is once again leading me around by the nose.

PS . The world is using both and you are more marketable using both , the more you know the more money you make ?

Why does Adobe insist on creating effects we KNOW won’t work on press?

What effects do you KNOW wont’ work on press, Shred? All those effects in CS2 and CS3, the transparency, the Photoshop-esque effects, they print. I can personally attest to that. I’ve been using InDesign CS3 for a year now, outputting materials to print (film and digital-to-press) without a problem.

Why does Adobe insist on creating effects we KNOW won’t work on press? Well, because the code is written by 20-somethings who have no experience with typography or the press. The web is their printing press. History and experience is for old farts…

Went to a CS3 launch seminar just this week. Asked the Adobe rep the above question. His response was to the effect of… we give you the guns and the bullets, you pull the trigger yourself.

We are not responsible…

Sounds like a very old Quark comment to me.

5 years from now when Adobe OWNS the DTP community - if they don’t already, we may wish their competition didn’t go away after all. The new Microsoft.

Both programs have their individual strong points and features, but if the past decade has taught anyone in this industry anything, its this: the world is big enough for both programs. And the limited gurus who are among my skill level are hopefully beginning to realize Adobe is a money hungry machine now. Frankly im tired of paying Adobe’s crew for the minimal upgrades, to stay in tune with overpayed designers.
Quark’s always been bugged on new releases, but they are usually tolerable and tend to get corrected promptly. So?
In my business, im fixing all the designers mistakes, and you all make plenty. Thanks for keeping us prepress technicians/software operators in business.

Craig in Memphis

Up until recently, V7, both or worked and provided output in predictable form. Now that quack 7 came on the scene trying to copy the perfection of ID, finally put the nail in the coffin. I run a mac pro dual 2.66/6gbram and v7.1 will take 10-20 times the amount of time to produce press quality pdfs if those new transparency features are used anywhere in the document.

I am not a designer or production artist, I FIX what they do wrong, and they do a lot of wrong things so this speed hit is totally unacceptable.

FWIW I know they say the V2 update shouuld fix this problem, but it should have never came about.

john

I have been putting off an inevitable switch to InDesign. After 12 years, I have had it with Quark. I am soooooooooo done.

My moment of clarity came when my new intel mac running quark 6.52 refused to work with my version of Myriad (Multiple Master), which is my company’s corporate font. I have tried all the known workarounds (turning certain extensions off, etc), but could not get the font to print. Bought the OpenType version of MyriadPro, but guess what—IT DIDN’T WORK EITHER. Now mind you, I have no other issues with either version of this font from any other program on this machine—only Quark. We don’t have the option of choosing another font.

InDesign always prints the fonts without a problem.

InDesign doesn’t tell me my brand new Myriad font is “corrupt and will be substituted by courier”.

InDesign won’t go into your fridge and drink all your beer (hey I know that’s a stretch, but don’t think those beyatches at Quark haven’t tried).

And with charitable pricing (we’re a non-profit) I can get the whole CS3 suite for less than just buying quark (who doesn’t recognize our NP status).

Quark—are you listening?? Just build a program that works! Why should your customers who spend the $900+ on your product be forced to come up with workarounds to make it work? I am just one of many people who use your product that will not be upgrading. You lost me for good!

By the way, I have been told by some people that I need to try Quark 7, because it’s vastly improved. My response to that statement cannot be printed on this forum.

QUARK SUCKS!!!!!