Grossemberg wrote:
Možeš li mi objasniti zašto mi savjetuješ InDesign ?
We publish two newspapers here. An alternative arts paper which is published using Quark, and an autoshoper which is published using Indesign. For the autoshoper, I have a font library which spans many CD’s. No matter what fonts I use in the publication (all opentype & Truetype) I have never worried as they are all encoded in the PDFs I send (printer still uses sytem 8.6/Quark 4.1) The other paper however, uses quark and is required to have an exact copy of the printers fonts on the disk. Imagine the chaos I go through weekly trying to keep that machine from crashing on the Type 1 postscript fonts that are choking the applications!
All told, Quark definately blows. Just wish I could convince the printers of this!
I’ve been in reprographics for twenty years and I use InDesign, Sod all to do with the interface. The only reason Quark survives is because of the unwillingness of repro houses to upgrade, many of them are still running version 4.1, anything above that version is buggy and unstable. Major print houses and publishers outside of the US have welcomed InDesign with open arms. Adobe offers far superior support for it’s products and is the creator of PDF. PDF is now the standard workflow for large scale publishing. Early adopters of PDF are doing very well out of it and have been doing so since the nineties. It’s the refusal of small bureaus and print houses to update their workflows that enables Quark to survive. To any business considering buying new and starting from scratch the price differences between what Quark and Adobe offer are phenomenal. If you buy a corporate licence from adobe they offer free support and initial setup help, Quark don’t. You’re lucky if you get a reply from Quark if you ask anything.
I used Quark for many years but when InDesign CS came out it blew Quark off my computer. It supported OpenType, had proper colour management features and its typesetting capabilities were far better. Quark just reacted sluggishly and comparing its price to the costs of InDesign (especially as part of the Adobe Creative Suite) sealed the deal. I was - and still am - pissed off by Quark and its negligence of features I consider important and/or desirable. The overall stability was just appalling. I haven’t properly tried Quark 7 yet, but if they don’t get their stuff together soon they might as well close shop.
There might be some people that use both, due to work requirements. The cost of Q7 is quite high when you look at ID4. Buy ID4 as part of the CS package and it’s a real bargain.
If you have a preference for Q7, then use it. I don’t think there’s going to be many people here that have warmed up to it.
-Can you select a page icon from Q7 and drop it on another file to instantly add the page to the other document?
-Can you do a file > place in Q7, go to import options and select ‘all’ the pages of a pdf file, and place the pdf file page for page in one pass? The multi loaded place icon is very cool.
-Can you place native psd or ai files in Q7? When you place a native ai file, you get more options under import options than you do for eps. What about psd files with transparency?
-I’ve heard that Quark will allow for live separations preview, but what about the ink manager? I’ll get a file with three swatches for Reflex Blue, reflex coated, reflex uncoated, and more reflex, ink manager allows the user to set up an alias so that one separation is printed, instead of three.
-I do use Quark at work, on occaision, I don’t like the palettes, they don’t collapse.
I’m not going to tell you to drop Quark as an option and run out and buy InDesign. I’m going to tell you that you have free choice to use the tool you feel best suited for. The above mentioned items are things that I’ve gotten used to on the job, they make the role of a prepress monkey more bearable.
Therefore it’s not a Q7 vs ID4 thread. It’s finding a comfort level thread. And as stated in previous posts, most people with a comfort level in this forum, are going to choose ID4.
Quark’s rep is based largely on the opinions of its userbase, which are increasingly lukewarm, if not downright negative. This is the fualt of Quark and Quark alone. The fact that they control such a large share of the desktop publishing software market has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with time: Quark existed, and was a dominant force, long before competitors like Adobe’s InDesign even existed. Which makes that Quark has lost so much ground to InDesign all the more shameful. 5 or 10 years ago, if you’d asked me what the best desktop publishing software was, I’d have said Quark. But that was then, and this is now. The fact is, Quark’s last several upgrades have created more problems than they’ve solved, to the point that a lot of the publshing industry has stuck with older versions of the software.
With Quark 7, the developers have taken two steps forward and one step back: they’ve added lots of features to play catch-up with InDesign, while at the same time sacrificing some of the things that made people like Quark in spite of all its flaws: speed and simplicity, to name a few. Quark stopped caring about its customers years ago – their (until recently) notoriously awful customer support is evidence of that – and has only taken action now that it sees its giant market share threatened by Adobe.
I used Quark for 2 years (I had to learn it in school); and found it awkward and unnecessarily frustrating to use. Essential tools that in InDesign were easy to find and always available with palettes were, in Quark, buried in contextual menus; when you had one menu open, you couldn’t do anything else. Prior to Quark 7, not having proper OpenType support or being able to do something as basic as transparency or drop shadows was a huge aggravation. Why should I have to go into Photoshop to create something as simple as a drop shadow, and why should I have to re-export my files as bloated TIFFs – everytime I need to make a design change?
I wouldn’t have a problem with Quark if it were being marketed at a $150 or $200 price point, but it’s being marketed at a $749 price point. People should be asking themselves what justifies that kind of price, because it certainly isn’t development costs. It’s misleading of Quark to be touting their software as an InDesign equivalent, when it has serious stability issues and nowhere near as many features as Adobe’s program. For reasons that are unknown to me, Quark’s customers continue to put up with continual disappointment, and the developer’s lackadaisical and indifferent attitude towards anything except the bottom line.
Does Quark get the job done? Yes. Will it make you money? Yes. Is it the most efficient way of getting the job done? No. Is InDesign a more efficient program? Yes. Is it more stable? Yes. Does it have more features? Yes. Is it easier to use? Yes. Will you make more money with it? Quite possibly. Why, then, if we know the answers to all of these questions, are people still not able (or willing) to definitively answer this question: is InDesign better than Quark? As far as I’m concerned, if it (Quark) walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a lemon.
Post edited by: prof.Milgram, at: 2006/09/01 12:14
