There are a few points I’d like to dispute, though:

Quark XPress 6.5 as of this writing costs $1,019.00 in a major mail-order catalog. The ENTIRE Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GoLive and Acrobat - FIVE programs) costs $1,140.00 in the same catalog.

Are those amounts in U.S. dollars? If so, don’t buy anything from that catalog. Quark 6.5 retails for US$945, and Creative Suite Premium for US$1,299.

Your point about the costs of the entire workflow are valid. Buying the entire Creative Suite Premium, with its five point products, is effectively the equivolant cost of any two of those products. This is the main benefit to the suite model of software sale. Just look what it did for the business application space in the early Nineties when Microsoft’s Office Suite trampled WordPerfect right out of business.

And training costs? Hah. If you can use Illustrator you can use InDesign. If you are familiar with Quark you can make the switch easily enough. Any industry professional who needs 2 days of intensive training to learn the essentials of InDesign should be tested for drugs. Or given some.

I have to disagree with you there. Granted, I make my living in part by training people to switch from Quark to InDesign, but, by virtue of that part of my career, I know that different people learn in different ways. I train people all over North America to use Quark, InDesign, Creative Suite, and many other products. Though InDesign is intuitive, it does take time to learn—especially when one is productive in Quark.

Tools and features behave differently. Where Quark puts the majority of its functions in dialog boxes, InDesign puts them on palettes that are organized differently than Quark. Terminology differences are another stumbling block—for example: If Quark is your bread and butter, the term “runaround” is plain English to you . Trying to find runaround settings in InDesign is often frustrating. Coming from knowing only Quark, many users don’t intuitively grasp that, not only is it on a palette instead of a dialog, but the function is called (the more logical) “text wrap”. Further, to get to the Text Wrap palette one must navigate a two-deep menu.

Some people—obviously you and I as well—pick it up easily. Others need expert guidance, especially from someone who understands their work, how they did it in Quark, and how they can do it just as productively, if not better, in InDesign.

Quark XPress Passport Edition, which costs $1,895 and comes with a troublesome USB dongle. InDesign has all of its features and MORE at 1/3 the price.

Passport Edition no longer uses the dongle as an anti-piracy measure. They dropped that with version 6.

Agreed, InDesign has most of the features of Passport in the standard version.

The cost.

Quark XPress 6.5 as of this writing costs $1,019.00 in a major mail-order catalog. The ENTIRE Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GoLive and Acrobat - FIVE programs) costs $1,140.00 in the same catalog.

If you still wanted to go with Quark XPress, to accomplish your work you’d still have to purchase Photoshop (or a competitor), Illustrator/FreeHand, and Acrobat Pro. Purchased separately, these costs can easily be $1,500. Of course, that means that if you wanted to run a productive prepress shop, printer, or design studio, you would still likely buy the entire Adobe Creative Suite in order to save on those three programs. Which means you would get InDesign “thrown in”. So why not use it?

And training costs? Hah. If you can use Illustrator you can use InDesign. If you are familiar with Quark you can make the switch easily enough. Any industry professional who needs 2 days of intensive training to learn the essentials of InDesign should be tested for drugs. Or given some.

Quark continues to offset their huge development costs of all of their failed software ventures by charging more and more for their ONE good product: Quark XPress. Don’t get me started on Quark XPress Passport Edition, which costs $1,895 and comes with a troublesome USB dongle. InDesign has all of its features and MORE at 1/3 the price.

There is no reason to use Quark XPress unless you are tied to a Quark Copydesk system at a major publisher. My $0.02