Opinion of Quark 8

[prepressguru]

So please stop bashing either software. The best answer above was use whatever your client uses.

John W

John this is the best answer.

I just pick either one to get stuff done. I can't understand how people get so attached to software...

[jamest]

I work in a desktop publishing company that deals with text books. We are happy that 99% of our QUARK clients have finally moved from Quark 4 to Quark 6.5. It's a major upgrade for our clients because most of our books rely on plugins that are not being upgraded to the newer versions of Quark. Having said that, 85% of our clients have switched to Indesign CS3 or CS4.
I started on Quark 3 and have always liked Quark until CS3. We can produce PDFs so much faster and without most of the problems we had before.

I will add that the constant upgrades from Adobe and Apple are driving up the cost of supporting every platform a customer might have. Lots of our competitors are going out of business... it's scary. You need to support the clients but the upgrades are costing more then the jobs are bringing in.

[tthompson]

InDesign is a better application by a wide margin. When Quark was king (version 4ish) I used it like everyone else and was happy, but that was then.
I have no respect for a company that had a virtual lock on the page layout market and sat on their a$$ counting their $$ while Adobe worked hard to come up with something better, which they eventually did.
I wouldn't recommend Quark to anyone at the present.

[Rich H]

I'm a designer who follows this forum b/c I've always cared about what happens to my jobs when they go the printer, and I have to weigh in on this topic. (One prepress operator--within the last year or so--told me that "Indy is better for designers but Quark is better for production" but I never got the details). I was a long-time Quark user and was appalled at the early versions of Indy. But when CS2 came along, it seemed like Quark was really on a downward slide, so it was easy to get hooked. From a designers perspective, why buy Quark when you could buy CS and get Photoshop and Illustrator "thrown in" for about the same $$$ (at least in upgrades). Also, at the time of the switchover for me, Quark's handling of pdf's was horrible and InD was a breeze. Also at that time Quark and Adobe didn't even acknowledge each other's existence--where did that leave us? Designers also love the tight integration that Adobe has with all of its products.

[Rich H]

almaink, I'm intrigued by your statement, "Since Quark is still a postscript based application..." As a designer, I've assumed that postscript was the basis for both apps. if Indy isn't postscript--what is it?

[leokor]

almaink, I'm intrigued by your statement, "Since Quark is still a postscript based application..." As a designer, I've assumed that postscript was the basis for both apps. if Indy isn't postscript--what is it?

InDesign supports both PostScript and Adobe Print Engine. In general, Adobe is pushing hard for everyone to switch to Adobe Print Engine. PostScript is getting dated.

Leo

[Shawn]

Quark actually makes better pdfs than InDD! And it's compatibility with Acrobat is also superior now.
John W

Hi John

In what ways are you seeing better PDFs from Quark over InDesign? Our experience has been the exact opposite, especially with recent versions prior to 8.1 (6, 7, 8.0). Up until 8.1 transparency out of Quark was a nightmare and I still see more font problems processing Quark jobs and more processing errors if the internal Quark PDF export engine is used instead of Distiller.

And please don't take this as Quark bashing. I'm out here in the trenches getting the jobs done and am just curious why you're having fewer problems with Quark on your side of the trench...

[TJPrinter]

As a printer, I love that I don't have to worry about keeping up with these upgrades. A pdf workflow has saved thousands of dollars of lost time fixing and making last minute changes to customer supplied files. Choose the program that best works for you. InDesign, Quark, and yes, even Publisher and Corel are all capable of creating print ready pdf's. Customers are thrilled when they learn how easy and reliable it is to create a pdf. We can all work and enjoy the "canvas" that we prefer. Good luck to all!

[William Campbell]

Anyone who favors Xpress over Indy has their head in the sand and refuses to pull it out long enough to test each program fairly. I apologize in advance if I'm insulting anyone, that is not my intent, rather that we not sugar-coat the facts. Straight talk is far more valuable. I have no "favorite" software. I watch the facts and live with them daily. Also, I'm speaking from two decades of experience with this stuff. I've seen the history pass before my eyes.

An earlier post in this thread brought up the real issue: PostScript versus PDF, which is the format the Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE) consumes. Postscript, and it's consumer, CPSI, is yesterday's technology. Postscript cannot, and will never process transparency. Any application (including Adobe's), when writing PostScript for a page using transparency, achieves the desired effects by using tricks that help PS get there.

On the other hand, PDF since 1.4 does understand transparency. While Indy can do both PS and PDF, when it does PDF, PS is left out of the equation. And when that PDF is left unflattened and given to an APPE renderer, PS is never involved. This is the new world of prepress -- flattening is delayed until rendering, as it was meant to be all along (we have finally arrived, and ended the nightmare launched by AI9, a cart before the horse nightmare).

The problem with XPress: it's underlying technology *appears* to remain PostScript. Which, no doubt, it was king of in its day. The entire reason XPress was better back in the day: tight integration with Adobe and the PS libraries gave Quark the upper hand on everyone else. XPress made better PS due to a close relationship with its inventor: Adobe.

But then something happened, which was the beginning of the end. Time for a history refresher. Some years back, Quark (the company) made a hostile takeover attempt aimed at Adobe. A ridiculous idea IMO, but whatever. It failed, not too big a surprise, but the real impact of this business strategy is that it soured relations between the two DTP giants. A funny thing happened after that -- Quark was denied licensing to the (then) emerging PDF libraries. And so Quark had to obtain clone PDF libraries (I believe, that XPress currently uses the JAWS PDF interpreter. Or at least it had last I saw. Please, chim in, anyone with other facts).

So the thing is, in this day and age of PDF, Quark is the estranged family member. It's too bad, the program was, and still is a great interface, no question. But there's so much it can't do, because it's been crippled by its now rival, which was a former friend. And what XPress tries to do, in some cases, it fails at so miserably it's almost embarrassing.

Today is a good example -- I have an XPress 8 job with Photoshop EPS placed. Not a problem for me, but I sure feel sorry for the designer who used circa 1995 techniques to composite all the overlaying imagery in Photoshop. They could have assembled all that in the layout if using Indy, in a fraction of the time. Anyway, that's not the real prepress issue here. This time around, the job did not match the color of the last time, not even close. I was elected to investigate.

My discovery: if a Photoshop EPS has a profile attached, XPress re-separates the image, even though it's already CMYK. I'm not shocked by that. Some workflows have the same tendancy. The part that shocks me is how terrible of a job it does. The color management module in Quark 8 is horrible. Even when all the correct profiles are aligned (we shoot for GRACoL G7), the program produces garbage. The color was mangled.

The result of my investigation is that the earlier job did NOT have any profiles saved in the Photoshop EPS files, so XPress left the images alone and they looked great. This time, with profiles embedded in the EPS files, XPress did it's ugly thing.

Does Indy do this? I don't even know. But I'll say this: I have all profiles set (as I tried to replicate in XPress, to no avail), and when I process jobs using Indy with placed Photoshop elements, profile set or not, there isn't any mangling of color. If Indy is re-separating, it's doing a damn good job of it, to the point that no one notices.

To close on XPress, the sorest spot for me (and should be for any designer using it) is that XPress can't import transparency correctly (from a PDF with native transparency, or layered PSD). Maybe version 8 can place a PSD, but that doesn't mean it comes out right at our end. It does NOT. Indy does it without a second thought, spot colors and everything (at last).

Now, to flip the coin: this doesn't mean, by any means, that I'm a fan of CS4. Yikes! ENOUGH of object-oriented programing. (my definition: choice of lazy programmers, a language saves them time). The performance of AI-CS4 is a DOG compared to CS3. It's killing my productivity. Optimize (write in plain C maybe?) most of that code so it moves, moves, moves, for the USER, not the programmer. In that respect, yes, in days past and today, at least the programmers at Quark always were pioneers of tight code.

William Campbell
Revere Graphics Portland Oregon USA
william@rgraphics.com

[Elgane]

I think Quark is so outdated, I used to love it in the years of v3, 4, but when Cs2 came out, it was a huge jump in ease of use and options, and now with Cs4, the gap is wider than ever.

Heres a few things :

Placing tab stops in indesign vs quark, not a huge deal, but having the lines show up bellow and not having to click apply to see the result is very nice.

Nested style sheets in indesign, I once had a travel brochure with a huge spread of small codes referring to different options, like the name of the travel package, then a tab, a bold G, tab red $, tab something else, tab something and on and on. Doing this by hand takes forever, doing this with a nested style sheet takes a few clicks.

Object styles, not sure if Quark can do this now

Copying stuff in indesign, just drag holding option, as far as I know you have to duplicate the box, then move it, and if its doable the shortcut is probably something like option, cmd, ctrl, shift, f1, f2, x, up down, left right, lol you get my drift.

Grep styles, very new, a bit tedious, but can be VERY powerful.

Variables, it's kind of rare where you would need that option, but I have had a need for them in a 200 page coupon book, and trust me, I saved 2 days of work by building it using variables.

Importing indesign files into indesign. I know i've heard it can be buggy, but I have had an instance of where I had a huge grid of numbers which were common for both languages on one layer, and 2 other layers, one french text, one for english text, built in one Indesign file.

Then I had a final french layout, and an english one, and I could just import the Original indesign in each of my layouts, and just activate which layers i needed depending on language. So when the time came to do changes in the huge grid, i just opened up that file, did the changes, saved it making sure i kept the same layers active when I saved, and then just opened both my final english and french files, just updated the grid in my links because its considered like an image (but its an indd file), and everything updated perfect, with the english layers staying active in my english file and french in french etc.

The links window, so much better than that Quark usage window, specialy in CS4, if you work in an office where designers dont always have the time to keep links tiddy in the same links folder, you can now just select all the links and hit : copy links to, and select your links folder, its kind of like a quick collect for just the pictures, very useful i think.

Thats just a few things, there's so many others. Like I said, i used to love Quark, but all these little things save me so much time that i would never want to go back to Quark. Just my 2 cents.