My QuarkXpress Rant

I dumped Quark back in the '90s when they had the gall to charge $300+ for an update that added nothing feature-wise. The update cost was just because they recompiled from the 68000 architecture to PowerPC.

I dumped Quark back in the '90s when they had the gall to charge $300+ for an update that added nothing feature-wise. The update cost was because they changed the binaries from the 68000 architecture to PowerPC.

I never really bothered with Quark. Always been an Adobe guy, back then with PageMaker and today with InDesign.

I've always found quark to be way faster than indesign. I use both pretty much daily, and quark certainly has its own set of issues, but indesign clunkiness also makes we want to cry.

Who still uses Quark? Gross! And how is Quark faster than InDesign? Yeah right! Lies! Quark belongs in the past along with Pagemaker.

decksnap said:

I've always found quark to be way faster than indesign. I use both pretty much daily, and quark certainly has its own set of issues, but indesign clunkiness also makes we want to cry.

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I was a heavy advocate of InDesign from 2.0 onwards, and managed to drag at least one print shop I worked for kicking and screaming from a Quark/Postscript workflow to an InDesign/PDF workflow.

But, I have to say, I like Quark 8 better than InDesign CS3. ID suffers from Adobe's ever-increasing desire to shoehorn in as many features as possible from other applications in the suite. The result is a bloated, confusing mess.

I do the majority of my paying work in Illustrator these days and I imagine I might feel differently if Quark was my main work app, but I do use it daily and it feels fast, unfussy and uncluttered.

Cheers

Jim

Evoken said:

I never really bothered with Quark. Always been an Adobe guy, back then with PageMaker and today with InDesign.

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so you really mean an Aldus/Adobe Guy, right?

(PM was Aldus from its introduction in 1985 until acquired by Adobe almost 10 years later, in 1994)

doug in albq said:

so you really mean an Aldus/Adobe Guy, right?

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I still miss Aldus SuperPaint!

Cheers

Jim

I also hate QuarkXpress with a passion. Though version 8 isn't too bad, I've had to work with it since version 6.0 (luckily not 4) through all of my jobs and have had just about enough... I always used InDesign for my private/freelance work and now am lucky enough to have moved jobs into an InDesign environment

That being said, QuarkXpress 8 isn't bad at all, and is far more 'straight forward' than ID. Just not as good. In my opinion. Its interactive designer bit always seem interesting though.

Pagemaker was good back in the day... Shame it died, but I'm happy ID came out of it

Don't forget there are some handy conversion tools if you need them - Markzware offer software which does a reasonable job of going either way (Q to ID or ID to Q).

We have not used Quark for a good few years so I wanted to sell our old copy of QK 4 and QK 5 (Upgrade) but was told by Quark that unless your business has been bought out/merged etc you can't transfer the license to a third party!

So you are stuck with old software for good (legally!)

Had some old Adobe stuff also, quick download of a form for license transfer and job done. No wonder people moved to inDesign!

As much contempt as I have for Quark (and as much contempt as Quark used to have for us), I have to admit I wish they would come out with a way to more directly compete with Adobe. A photo editor, vector editor and a web compiler would be a good start.

I wouldn't expect Quark to have a Photoshop/Illustrator/Dreamweaver killer right off the bat, but InDesign started off pretty weak too, and IMO has surpassed Quark in a lot of ways.

Also, I hear Quark has improved drastically since the days of v4 & 5. Still haven't used it.

I used to use QuarkExpress years ago...It was a great program back then on my SE30then they lost it.

Frankly, I'm surprised they're still around.

The last version of Quark I used was 6.5 and only because I took over a position where they had 100's of Quark files that needed updates. Every new file I created was in InDesign and I was a much happier person for it.