Mac vs PC -- Indesign vs Quark
I have been a designer with a company that designs and produces text books for all of the major publishers in the US for going on 8 years now. We have had between 25-60 production artists on staff over the past 4 years at our main site, and a satelite office with 10-20 (not sure of exact numbers at the moment). Add to that 12 designers, Imaging, Prepress, an Editoral, project management, and art research departments. We use a lot of Macs, some are handed down to other departments as they are moved out of design, imaging, pre-press, and production.
One number in the "market share" data that is missed a lot of times is the "installe base" of the computer in question. There are probably more "old" macs in service than a similar vintage PC in buisnesses that use computers becouse the software that is needed toget the work done still works on the old Macs, and the computers themselves still work good enough for the job at hand.
Where I work are still on OS X, and will be till sometime next year. This is due to timing on Apples latest "Up to date" program, and the current financial conditions of the market than anything else. However, there is also a reluctance to make large moves in software adoption becouse of the potential cost of incompatabilities that can crop up, remember the move to Photoshop 5 and the problems their new color engine created? So this year our IT department updated everyone to OS 9.2, and Apple, and Quark will have to wait on a fairly large chunk of change for an upgrade.
Now to the point, I have been using Quark for over 7 years. Recently I had the oppertunity to use Indesign on a "In House" research project. My impressions of it are great, to a point. It is a great design tool, not so great as a production tool. The reasons:
It is slow (possibly faster on OS X, but on OS 9 it is slow on my dual gig an a 10 page document, and some of the ones we work with push 30 pages). This is a major problem when Quark works faster on legacy machines in these economic times, and Apples hardware is not giving companies compelling reasons to upgrade.
Also, due to its PDF format, it "flattens" the pages when it prints. So if you use any of the bells and whistles, such as transparency, you kill your OPI workflow. Now we are back to taking 5-30+ minutes for a page clear off the production artists computer then more to wait for it to move across the network to the print server. This is a major problem when you are printing 100 pages that need to go out, and the same document built in Quark clears the computer in less than 10 minutes (all 100 pages).
Dont get me wrong I like Indesign, it has a great feature set, has strong AppleScript support, and with a PDF printing workflow it builds good print files. But right now it has some problems, at least in large document handeling.
Quark is not the winner either. Personally I like Quark 3.32 better than Quark 4.11, and I havent even had a chance to look at 5.0, we will probably skip it altogether unless our customers demand it (though right now they are researching Indesign). Quark does still have a strong install base, if not the best "upgrade" sales, and it works fairly predictably for print media.
lanes, Trains & Automobiles
