Quark rebrands, again

Quark is really just a "Production" tool. I wouldn't classify it as a designers tool. Newe papers and magazines are not really "design work" as much as they are "production". With that being said, Quark does allow for Graphic tags in X-tags were Indesign does not. So your average user will not see the value of Quark over Indesign in that regard. As far as deesigning, Indesign does allow for more options than Quark has. I currently use both daily. Personally I like Indesign for 90% of my design work. But when it comes to making those big projects and master templates, I still find Quark more versatile and user friendly for the next user... unfortunatly.

~Mark~ NC

Well, I guess it's better to spend the money on rebranding the same old stuff, since the spendings on development seems to have ceased. It's quite funny that you always read and hear more about Quark rebranding, than the products. Adobe beware! You're about to meet some serious marketing competition.

I used Quark for many years at three different newspapers and I was a hard-core fan. I even bought a copy for my own computer at home to do my own projects. People told me InDesign was better, but I wouldn't believe them.

Then I moved to my current job, which uses InDesign instead, and I LOVE it. I fact, I can't believe I was so gung-ho about Quark. I can't stand to use Quark any more, and I'm kicking myself for dropping more than $600 dollars for it.

Like others have said, Quark is to Windows as InDesign is to Macs. Not that they actually go together (Quark was always buggy on a windows machine).

Quark was fine for most things, but the commands were not intuitive and it was tough to get your media set up right to work in it. InDesign is part of the Adobe family and when you're using other programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, which everybody uses, then InDesign just... works.

Long story short, I liked Quark a lot when I had to use it. But given the choice now I would choose InDesign any day. In fact, I will be buying Adobe Creative Suite 3 for my future MacBookPro, which I will buy the day Adobe starts shipping Universal applications.

And no matter what the price tag is, I'll never look back.

Sony Ericsson?!

Work at the Star-Bulletin here in Hawaii. We're gradually moving to OS X, but we're still running Quark 4.1 in Classic.

And if you can believe it, some of us still have Multi-Ad Creator on our machines! Talk about ancient!

InDesign CS2 is so complete and terrific I cannot imagine going back to Quark (and that after years of daily Quark use). I made the switch to InDesign with OS X and every aspect of my workflow was streamlined and improved, particularly with CS2 and the total integration of all the Adobe products. Every former Quarkhead I know that's tried InDesign in the last few years has made the jump; it's only the old-timers and those unfortunates hopelessly bogged down in years' worth of XTensions that are sticking with that dog. Particularly for PDF production, InDesign is just head and shoulders above Quark.
For what it's worth, the papers still using Quark in this burg are using Quark 4.1 in OS 9. The broken looks on their faces tell that story...

I use Quark daily and the house that prints our paper prints over 20 other publications. Every single one of those publications is built in Quark.

Quark has it's problems and has lost a bucketload of marketshare to InDesign, but to say it's dead is jumping the shark IMHO.

I guess the Quark received a cease and disease letter from the Scottish Arts Council. ;-)

http://www.scottisharts.org.uk/default.aspx

"Printers like printing from InDesign"

The only reason to actually print from InDesign is to made separations of spot colour jobs that use transparency. Otherwise, exporting a PDF will suffice 95% of the time. The same goes for Illustrator.

Quark, in order to even reach feature parity with InDesign, needs first-class PDF and transparency support, and variable type support. If they can't produce this then they will be limited to only the most basic of jobs and will be used only of the most die-hard of users, who will eventually go away completely (pointing the finger at you Newspapers) because of their refusual to embrace new technology and new ways of doing things. Upgrade or perish is the mantra of the new age of publishing. Those who do will compete and survive. Those who don't will be bought out by a company that does.

From post #8: "And a production manager at another company told me that from a production standpoint, nothing is more stable and more predictable than Quark 4/OS 9 and there's no reason to upgrade."

It's true that Quark 4/OS 9 is -predictable-... it had a well known set of bugs and problems. But nothing more stable? That's a load of bollocks. OS 9 is inherently unstable. Rebooting an OS 9 machine after a lockup every day or so was par-for-the-course. In today's OS X world it's possible not to reboot a machine for months (assuming you're not fiddling with software installs etc.)

That's not to say InDesign is more stable than Quark - I don't think any Adobe product is particularly well debugged these days - but Quark/OS9 were certainly not a 'stable' combination. just predictably unstable.