But CS2 and beyond won me over. I am not only a designer, I am a computer graphics instructor. Having to go from teaching Quark to teaching InDesign has reinforced my belief that InDesign is easer for students to learn. Quark has three to four steps necessary to save a style sheet, for example, while InDesign does it in one.

I am not familiar with Quark 8 and will keep an open mind about it. Eight may be the best version of Quark ever marketed and it may blow InDesign out of the water. My guess is that it will be better than InDesign for some things and not as good in others.

And the war continues…

Thanks

… :)

P.S. Quark Sucks.

Now I hate it. In fact I’ve come to loathe it more and more. I took it completely off my system at home, and got a 3rd party plugin (http://markzware.com) to convert all my Quark docs to InDesign CS3.

At work, we are still so backward that we use Quark, when even companies in Third World countries are switching over to InDesign. (While for them, this may be because you can actually afford to buy the whole Creative Suites for as much as it costs to buy one lousy copy of Quark, this is still a good decision on their part.

Quark, you NEVER listened to us the users. You could get away with this when the competition was PageMaker, but not anymore. InDesign is here and it’s time to shape up or ship out.

Another issue is whether someone moving from QXP to ID is willing to learn the ID way of doing things. If you keep treating ID as if it were QXP you will be unhappy.

After just starting a new job, another designer and I have an option of upgrading to Quark 8 or making the switch to InDesign CS4. The other designer has been happy using Quark for 10+ years. Here’s the question…Has anyone used Quark 8 and a recent InDesign to give a decent comparision?

Although i enjoy better working on Indesign.. i must admit that both programs have their strenghts and weaknesses.

I know its a crazy mans wish but.. why cant they embed conversion for opposing programs?? It would make my life (and many others) so much easyer… and it wouldnt change my choice.

But its still nice to know what Im missing while using CS4.

I FUCKING HATE QUARKXPRESS!!!! This stupid program SUCKSSS!! Especially the version 7 and high… and my life is a fucking nightmare because I have to work everyday with this stupid program!! it crush all the fucking time!! is someday I know a programmer of QuarkXpress I kick his ass.

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?