I spent a lot of time looking at QuarkXPress 7 betas before the change. While the interface is much improved and there are many improvements in the program, I was disappointed that features that are core to magazine production were not improved (and I lobbied Quark for a long time about these issues). Style sheets are much weaker than InDesign and I found that designers tended not to use them. I find since switching to InDesign designers make much better use of style sheets due to InDesign’ allowing to build sytle sheets on one another, the ease in modifying stylesheets and the preview capabilities. Likewise InDesign master pages are way superior to QuarkXPress’. Inheritance is a major factor.

And Quark still has not released QPS 4 yet, meaning that my magazine could not even use QuarkXPress 7 since there is no workflow soultion for it.

Its just that one “company” is screwing the marketplace while their users are too busy congratulating each other to notice. Adobe & Macromedia was bad - real bad.

They’ve been pretty thrilled with the way QXP7’s been working for them., and I take that as a sincere sentiiment; QXP 7 is, I feel, a great improvment over QXP 6.x. A Quark user would be very pleased with the improvments on this.

that’s interesting to hear, do you have any feedback from their side?

Martin

That’s maybe more interesting than “experts” telling us…

Print on
Martin

I’m not a ‘Adone-is-the-best-screw-all-the-rest. In fact, on my site www.macmojo.nl you can read several articles about Adobe products like Distiller with crazy self-heal functions, InDesign with not optimal transparancy flattening standards that can cause major problems, ‘hidden’ but very important pallets in Illustrator, stupid translations for the old ‘overprint’ and the newer transparancy functions, Adobe’s desicion to split Acrobat into several products (Pro, and all that), Adobe’s choise for non-standard ISO ICC overhere in Europe, letting SWOP be the default for colorsync in Photoshop in Europe and ‘what not’. But it’s in Dutch. I’m thinking about translating the articles in English. A lot of the info is for European standards, so I don’t know just how useful it might be in English…

if “It’s not about who invented it. It’s about what company actually INVENTS. ” was true, then you should rave for Quark, as they invented precision (boxes, leading in pt sizes), made transparencies useful (attribute-level, not object level) and gave advantage by implementing PS-functionality in a layout app.

By the way all things Adobe did copy (into PM) or will copy (e.g. boxes, granular transparencies and Photoshop effects) into CS3.

But still I somehow doubt you will now critize Adobe ;-)

Greetings
Peter

@Peter, It’s not about who inveted it. It’s about what company actually INVENTS. It’s far more likely to expect new/better things from Adobe then from ‘that other page layout company’.

@Martin, ofcourse. It’s the way the world works. But most people here are pro’s and have used or will use more then one single program. We can see through (most of the) ’smoke and mirrors’ from Adobe, Quark, and others. Even if we don’t we will find out soon enough when using the program. Anf because of the internet the world will know if we think it sucks! (This was the main reason Quark closed it forum shortly after the release of Quark Xress 6). LOL…

http://www.layersmagazine.com/indesign/

Very unbiased, neutral article…. wait, strange, these guys make money with Adobe products. Hm, why does InDesign win here I wonder???

When do people finally realize and see that there is no neutral study? Wake up and test yourself. Any study, any consultant will make a study in the favor of the person paying for it or becuase he/she sees a way of makign money with consulting after having advertised a certan direction, something “completely new, only we know about us. Ask us, we help you!”.

Hang in there
Martin

Don’t give up your day job and definitely don’t expect any phone calls from the Letterman Show re: vacancies for the “Top Ten” job.

I can tell that took you some time and effort and for that you should be applauded - by someone… somewhere

Furthermore anyone who thinks In Design will stay same price of cheaper after Quark is gone “because the market won’t allow it” lacks basic economic understanding. The market will pay what a company that has a monopoly charges - its simple. “The market won’t allow it”??? Haha thats the funniest thing I’ve read on this site to date! In a monopoly there is no market dictating prices. Some people posting here seem to miss that glaringly obvious fact.

When competition no longer exists the market can get stuffed. To the monopoly experts - please inform me of a few monopolies of late where prices, products and service actually “improved”??

Insane.

Adobe is a good company, and just becuase there is no direct competition doesn’t mean they become an evil empire. They have and all ways will be a fair software comapany. Microsoft is always going to be there and even if it wasn;t I feel they would stay fair.

Adobe CS is attractive, and prived to compete with just Xpress. Offering top to bottom graphics, layout, and printing solutions. To be in the same price range with all of that vs. Quarks Layout app just goes to show you that Adobe is good people.

whoc cares who invented it?
Do you drive a car? Which model?
Wheels = Egyptians; Car & Engine = Germans.

And boxes, pt leading, multi-ink colors etc. (in page layout apps) = Quark.

WHO CARES?

The better one makes the show.

Peter

As far as which one I prefer, not that it matters- I use both. Which ever one allows me not just to get the job done, but to get the job done faster and with less worry… That’s the one I’ll use. I give a rat’s @$$ about how pretty something is. Give me the functionality to make what I need happen, happen.