Quark Vs. InDesign
Introduction
Once upon a time, the only way to break into Desktop Publishing was with an expertise in Quark Xpress, and access to the program was as exclusive as a country club. The interface was cryptic, so one had to shell out tuition to learn it; demo copies were non-existent, and the program itself was a fortress (at one point, you couldn't run the program without a "dongle"—a piece of hardware you bolted to the back of your computer—to unlock it. So I probably had an intitial resentment against Quark for hampering the industry so visciously in the early days.
Then along came Adobe InDesign. I first signed up to Beta test the application for free. The initial price was $99, and so was the Version 2 upgrade. Armed with a plethora of instruction, documentation, and intuitive integration with other Adobe applications, I began working with InDesign every chance I could get-- even suffering the ire of my superiors, who only knew Quark and were afraid of something new.
Those luddites might still be wringing their hands over my mustang ways if it weren't for two things: further upgrades of Quark were even more frustrating, and InDesign just kept getting cooler and cooler. Version 6 of Quark tightened up its licensing so that you couldn't even install a copy on your home computer (which meant you had to purchase a completely new license to telecommute occasionally!) No other productivity tool is so stingy. Meanwhile, Version 5 claimed to use tables, while those tables were nothing more than linked text boxes! Despite all their claims for XML integration, support was spotty and unreliable.
InDesign, on the other hand, was just the opposite: it conformed to PDF and XML standards from the start; tables consisted of tabular structures and could be linked reliably with spreadsheets and databases. The wardrums beat on the hillside, heralding a publishing revolution. Today, in Washington D.C., government printing agencies are recognizing the sense of an InDesign workflow, and while print shops are re-tooling to Mac OS X, they are migrating in droves to InDesign.
©2004 MadMac Creations
All recommendations are to be used at the reader's discretion, and is subject to change without notice. While a best effort is made to test software and techniques provided, the reader is advised to test thoroughly prior to implementation. MadMac Creations takes no responsibility for any losses accrued, unless Tony MacFarlane has been contracted.
