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with 144 posters participating, including story authorAs the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.
Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and... uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do—or fail to do—that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn’t listen.
The rise
Hi all, here are some first independent reviews and comments regarding IDML Import: Dutch. 'Open je InDesign idml-bestand in. QuarkXPress 2017!'
I went to a high school for the arts—yes, it was just like Fame, so stop asking—and only got seriously into computers, Photoshop, and design in the early nineties. Back then, when asked “what program do you learn for jobs in page layout and design,' there was only one answer: QuarkXPress. Sure, you might have heard the name Pagemaker by Aldus—later purchased by Adobe—but even with my little awareness of the publishing world outside our school walls, it was obvious that no one used it. When I eventually got summer jobs in DTP service bureaus and magazines, the dominance of QuarkXPress 3 was total. The widely reported statistics were that XPress enjoyed 95 percent dominance of the publishing market at that time. But when I left Vice in ’99, the privately held Quark Inc.’s best days were behind them. That was the year that Adobe’s InDesign 1.0 hit the market.
To say that InDesign made a splash would be optimistic. Most of us were too busy using XPress in hardened, well-established production routines under tight deadlines. We didn't immediately notice something that had as good a chance at taking over our honed workflow as did a reversion to Letraset. But things swiftly changed, and by 2004, Quark’s market share reportedly declined to 25 percent. That is what we in the publishing biz refer to as “totally insane.”
Hubris
Anecdotal evidence is not the best way to objectively study anything, but ask anyone what caused them to leave XPress for InDesign. Overwhelmingly, it all boils down to those personal stories of neglect that eventually eroded Quark's appeal and made a potentially painful transfer to another product the lesser of the evils.
In 2001, Apple released OS X, which felt dog slow on existing hardware. Despite its inclusion of crucial publishing tech like AppleScript and ColorSync, it was definitely not production-ready. But OS 9’s failings are well documented—a bad font in an ad could literally cost you a third of your day dealing with system crashes. OS X’s single promise of Unix-like stability turned its other short-term problems with snappiness into non-issues.
Quark repeatedly failed to make OS X-native versions of XPress—spanning versions 4.1, 5, and 6—but the company still asked for plenty of loot for the upgrades. With user frustration high with 2002’s Quark 5, CEO Fred Ebrahimi salted the wounds by taunting users to switch to Windows if they didn’t like it, saying, “The Macintosh platform is shrinking.' Ebrahimi suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should 'switch to something else.'
It's advice people apparently took—just not the way he meant it. It was likely that Quark saw increasing growth in Windows sales as a sign that the Mac publishing market was dwindling. However, what they were probably seeing was new users, not migration to Windows. I've heard about Windows-based publishing environments, but I've never actually seen one in my 20+ years in design and publishing.
Perhaps this seems like an overstatement, but desktop publishing was invented on the Mac. It would have been hard to find people more rabidly pro-Mac than people who were basically keeping pre-Jobs Apple afloat. So when a revitalized Apple needed all the help it could get, telling Mac designers to switch to Windows was all the excuse these creatives needed to think that the grass was actually greener on the InDesign side. Simply put, this was a crucial nudge for many.
Then came InDesign
With 95 percent market share for its competition, InDesign faced an obvious uphill battle. But this market war turned out to be shorter than anyone would have predicted. It didn’t hurt that InDesign was backed by the much larger Adobe, but it was the energy and excitement surrounding InDesign's features that created a buzz you never saw with Quark. Adobe wasn't just copying Quark's approach or feature set—it made a program that was both for production nuts who needed to work efficiently and creatives who were shown how digital typography and layout was meant to be. As I wrote in my review, A QuarkXPress User’s Review of InDesign CS, the creative features of InDesign CS1 were impressive and made you realize that text could be honored, not just corralled into dull templates. Some of its innovations seem like common sense because theywere. There are too many to write about here, but consider this list of the kind of stuff that InDesign CS1 had that QuarkXPress 6 didn't have:
Hanging type
When you lay out a print publication, there is a lot of margin finagling that happens in order to keep things looking clean and readable. You'll often set a 'T' farther to the left of the margin to be a little more aligned to the letter's vertical stem with the margin edge. This creates a more pleasant overall shape to your text blocks:
If it's a drop cap in a paragraph, that means that the 'T' technically hangs outside of the text box to the left. This was never supported in QuarkXPress, so you were left to make a separate text box for the 'T,' remove the drop caps settings from the main text block, and then tediously move the large 'T' over the other text block to create a wraparound effect. After minutes of work, this accomplished one thing: a single letter hanging to the left of a paragraph. When you realize that this had to be done for every quotation mark in pull quotes or at the start of unindented paragraphs, that's a lot of wasted time. InDesign supported hanging type for this reason:
Notice how the dot in the 'i' in 'Hanging' also sits outside of the block. If you forced that line down to sit inside the rectangle, it would create a slight but unappealing vertical misalignment when you went to align the top border to other elements like pictures. You're probably thinking, 'so just move the text box up,' but print publications are designed with grids, and eyeballing wastes time. InDesign's text boxes were meant to be created within that grid system, and these create ideal type within a grid—no manual realignment or eyeballing required.
OpenType support
Contextual ligatures, fractions, etc. This was huge.
Trimmed page preview to see how your page looks when printed
This may seem like a small thing, but seeing your document as a trimmed booklet made a big difference for designers. Quark’s white pasteboard with a borderline through it could be visually misleading in the same way that painting your office red might be.
You could change multiple items (stroke color/value, for example) at once
It's truly laughable that this wasn't in QuarkXPress already. You had to edit one. thing. at. a. time.
Per-object stroke settings
In Quark, they were document-wide.
Eyedropper tool
To sample and apply styling to objects or text. This was absolutely massive for productivity since you didn't have to create a stylesheet just to match two blocks of text.
Pencil/pen tools
Better tools for more organic shapes.
High-res previews that were accurate
Where QuarkXPress layouts looked terrible without plug-ins to aid visualization, InDesign even made linked EPS files look good. It also rendered colors, accurately reflecting inks onscreen:
Effective resolution shown for scaled images
This reduced the need for preflight tools, which were an added expense.
A glyph palette
It was common knowledge among QuarkXPress users that you had to buy Popchar to get a feature that should have been in the app itself: a basic glyph palette to view custom characters and diacritics.
Excel file support
Duh.
Transparency and apply modes for PostScript Level 3 devices
This was another game-changer that saved trips to Photoshop or Illustrator to achieve simple transparency or apply-mode effects. It opened the doors up to a lot of creativity.
Optical kerning
Most of the time, you want to use a font's embedded kerning tables. But sometimes, they don't always produce the best results. I use a find/replace and optical kerning to fix all occurrences of French words like l’état, which always have the apostrophe squished in between the surrounding letters. Optical kerning saved manual kerning table edits to fix things like this. It was also great when combined with…
Listing image by Aurich Lawson
- 5.7OK
Pros
- ✓Mac OS X native
- ✓finally includes multiple undo
- ✓layout spaces
- ✓better tables and layers
- ✓full-resolution preview.
Cons
- ✕Paranoid support policies
- ✕limited HTML and PDF handling
- ✕file compatibility problems
- ✕no printed manual
- ✕no transparencies or drop shadows.
When QuarkXPress ruled desktop publishing, it could afford to make users wait...and wait...for each new version to come out. But in the long interim between versions 5 and 6, Adobe's InDesign had plenty of time to convert QuarkXPress users. Despite the new threat, Quark XPress 6 adds only a few new features -- some useful, others long overdue. We didn't see the stability issues that many have reported, but we did have some trouble opening legacy XPress files. Its new support for Mac OS X will be crucial to many who've held off updating their OS just for this. Unless you or your business is tied to Quark, however, InDesign's progressive features and integration with Photoshop, Illustrator and InCopy could be worth investigating.
Setup & interface
Installing QuarkXPress 6 takes a while, as the program places thousands of small files onto your hard drive. Unfortunately, this version doesn't install Quark's traditional sample layouts, which were great for demonstrating the application's capabilities. Although QuarkXPress 6 no longer requires the hardware dongle that long-time users will remember, you'll still be asked to jump through some registration hoops. Unlike Adobe’s InDesign, QuarkXPress 6 ties itself to one specific machine; you can't even install it on a desktop and your notebook for working on the road. In addition, international customers must purchase the Passport version, which is hideously expensive, costing £1,265 (inc. VAT). Once QuarkXPress 6 is running, long-time users might be asking what the fuss is all about. The interface is strikingly familiar, with floating palettes (new to those who haven't upgraded since version 3). The palettes still don't dock; otherwise, the regular tools and menu items are where you expect them to be, with the few new tools fitting in as if they had always been there.
Installing QuarkXPress 6 takes a while, as the program places thousands of small files onto your hard drive. Unfortunately, this version doesn't install Quark's traditional sample layouts, which were great for demonstrating the application's capabilities. Although QuarkXPress 6 no longer requires the hardware dongle that long-time users will remember, you'll still be asked to jump through some registration hoops. Unlike Adobe’s InDesign, QuarkXPress 6 ties itself to one specific machine; you can't even install it on a desktop and your notebook for working on the road. In addition, international customers must purchase the Passport version, which is hideously expensive, costing £1,265 (inc. VAT). Once QuarkXPress 6 is running, long-time users might be asking what the fuss is all about. The interface is strikingly familiar, with floating palettes (new to those who haven't upgraded since version 3). The palettes still don't dock; otherwise, the regular tools and menu items are where you expect them to be, with the few new tools fitting in as if they had always been there.
Features
If you're one of the many who skipped version 5 because it lacked OS X support, you'll find plenty of new tools to get used to -- most of which were introduced then and are simply reprised in version 6. Version 5 introduced rudimentary Web tools with XML support, table editing, layers, context-sensitive pop-up menus and a few other tweaks. The most significant introduction is layout spaces. When you choose File > New, you'll have the option to open a new project rather than a document. There, you can work on related layouts for the main project, such as business cards or Web pages, and access pieces of the project via tabs at the bottom of XPress's main window; you can also link text across layouts. This is a more efficient way to organise related documents, but the tool has shortcomings. For example, you can only flip between layouts instead of comparing them side by side, and document preferences aren't automatically applied across the project. QuarkXPress 6 improves layers and table capabilities. You have more printing options, and you can lock a layer independent of the locked/unlocked status of items on that layer -- although it would be nice to be able to share layers across different layout spaces. Version 6 adds some long-awaited features such as multiple undo. You can get full-resolution preview capabilities in QuarkXPress 6, but it entails downloading a free XTension (Quark's name for XPress plug-ins) after you've registered. Similarly, you can get the Edit Original 6.0 XTension, which restores the ability to edit in place. We think these XTensions should be built in. The program still lacks some useful features. When building tables, you still can't import from Microsoft Word and Excel, and you can't set tables over multiple pages; InDesign beats the pants off of QuarkXPress 6 in both areas. And QuarkXPress's PDF handling still lacks security features and supports only version 1.3. Worse, it still doesn't let you apply drop shadows or transparencies.
If you're one of the many who skipped version 5 because it lacked OS X support, you'll find plenty of new tools to get used to -- most of which were introduced then and are simply reprised in version 6. Version 5 introduced rudimentary Web tools with XML support, table editing, layers, context-sensitive pop-up menus and a few other tweaks. The most significant introduction is layout spaces. When you choose File > New, you'll have the option to open a new project rather than a document. There, you can work on related layouts for the main project, such as business cards or Web pages, and access pieces of the project via tabs at the bottom of XPress's main window; you can also link text across layouts. This is a more efficient way to organise related documents, but the tool has shortcomings. For example, you can only flip between layouts instead of comparing them side by side, and document preferences aren't automatically applied across the project. QuarkXPress 6 improves layers and table capabilities. You have more printing options, and you can lock a layer independent of the locked/unlocked status of items on that layer -- although it would be nice to be able to share layers across different layout spaces. Version 6 adds some long-awaited features such as multiple undo. You can get full-resolution preview capabilities in QuarkXPress 6, but it entails downloading a free XTension (Quark's name for XPress plug-ins) after you've registered. Similarly, you can get the Edit Original 6.0 XTension, which restores the ability to edit in place. We think these XTensions should be built in. The program still lacks some useful features. When building tables, you still can't import from Microsoft Word and Excel, and you can't set tables over multiple pages; InDesign beats the pants off of QuarkXPress 6 in both areas. And QuarkXPress's PDF handling still lacks security features and supports only version 1.3. Worse, it still doesn't let you apply drop shadows or transparencies.
Service & support
Service and support is the area where QuarkXPress 6 really hits the skids. A printed three-volume manual set is available only for a 100-euro (~£70) fee -- the program's help features are no replacement. Even if Quark's well-reported outsourcing of services to India doesn't worry you, the terms of service should. With the purchase of QuarkXPress 6, you get one free call to technical support -- for the life of the product. After that, it'll cost you £29 per incident, or you can buy service policies ranging from £75 for 90 days to £179 per year. Email support costs £12 per incident or £99 per year. Even if you're an expert who never needs to contact technical support, this policy is unacceptable for a professional application. Online resources such as FAQs and forums are not up-to-date, either. By comparison, Adobe offers 30 to 90 days of complimentary technical support for upgrades and new purchases (although it does also sell costly support plans for after that period expires).
Service and support is the area where QuarkXPress 6 really hits the skids. A printed three-volume manual set is available only for a 100-euro (~£70) fee -- the program's help features are no replacement. Even if Quark's well-reported outsourcing of services to India doesn't worry you, the terms of service should. With the purchase of QuarkXPress 6, you get one free call to technical support -- for the life of the product. After that, it'll cost you £29 per incident, or you can buy service policies ranging from £75 for 90 days to £179 per year. Email support costs £12 per incident or £99 per year. Even if you're an expert who never needs to contact technical support, this policy is unacceptable for a professional application. Online resources such as FAQs and forums are not up-to-date, either. By comparison, Adobe offers 30 to 90 days of complimentary technical support for upgrades and new purchases (although it does also sell costly support plans for after that period expires).