I just upgraded to CS3, and am excited about it. Can I help?

I use CS 3 at work.

wait till pattyfab comes online. she is the queen of quark.

I still use Quark!

Joshua and/or Patty, do please drop me a line at joeclark at the same domain dot org.

—
Joe Clark
http://joeclark.org/

I’m using CS3. Feel free to contact me if I can assist.

I still use Quark 3.3 for simple things like business cards where I want I nice clean, fast, intuitive program. Hate InDesign CS, but had to jump to it for heavy-duty work when Quark wasn’t keeping up.

still Quark. E-mail coming to you, Joe Clark.

powers

Print Action, the Canadian trade magazine, surveys this annually.

I use Quark. I am interested in hearing more about your research. Please contact me at:

typographer@gmail.com

I still use Quark a lot, as pointed out above. I’ll drop you a line.

I own CS3 but haven’t installed it yet as I’ve been told it’s slower on non-Intel macs. Is this true? I probably need to upgrade my laptop sooner rather than later to a MacBook Pro, so will test drive it on that. But I would be interested to know what other non-Intel Mac users think of CS3 as compared to 2.

I own CS3 but haven’t installed it yet as I’ve been told it’s slower on non-Intel macs. Is this true?

It will be faster than CS2 unless you’re low on RAM, in which case Rosetta can really be nasty. At work I’m running CS3 on a dual G5 with 1.5 gigs of RAM and have no issues.

Patty, I’m hurt. You doubt my word? ;^D

I’m using a 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4 with CS3 and am very happy that I did it. Oh and 1.5 GB of newer* SDRAM.

*A meltdown that lead me to buying some new.

Though I almost lost faith because of their arrogant foot-dragging over full OpenType support and their long refusal to offer good drop shadows and transparency, now that Quark 7 has caught up with everything I want, I’m back in the saddle with it and will never stray, foreseeably. I resent clients who presume to dictate my software, and I don’t permit them to do so—ever. I see no reason to have both clogging my system—not cheap, either. If InDesign is anything like Illustrator, as some have told me, then that’s another reason to spurn it: Illustrator I always detested as counter-intuitive.

i love and use quark. i hate indesign.

dr

I resent clients who presume to dictate my software, and I don’t permit them to do so—ever.

Even if said client pays you around 30Gs a year? Sorry if I’m not in a position to turn down that kind of money! You must have a pretty old machine if you’re worried about two applications clogging it up. Plus, fluency in both softwares makes me much more versatile and therefore employable, why on earth would anyone deliberately fight that?

It is interesting to see so many fellow Quark users climbing out of their holes, it can feel lonely on this forum where Quark-bashing is somewhat of a blood sport.

Tiff - what did I say????

I jumped ship when Creative Suite 1 was introduced, and have avoided looking back. I’ve used CS1, 2, and am currently using 3 at work. Maybe the newest Quark is better, but they lost me at v6, for a variety of reasons. I’d been on 4.1 for years prior to that, with a tiny, itty-bitty stint on 3 at the beginning of my formal design education.

This is taking me back. Remember the authentication dongles? Ha!

@pattyfab : maybe our friends at adobe can chime in here, but my understanding was that CS2 was optimized for pre-intel macs and will run **slightly** slower on intel macs, and CS3 was optimized for intel macs and runs **slightly** slower on pre-intels.

RAM, of course, makes a difference but i have both versions on both types of mac (both with 2 Gigs RAM) and i can’t tell any difference in speed. i think we’re talking nanoseconds...

Quark lost me when it came out with 5, I stayed with 4 until 6 came out; but by then I was using ID so much i rarely touched Quark. I don’t mind it as a program at all really, But I’ve gotten so used to the Bridge/Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign workflow I doubt I’d be as willing to switch now. To me that’s the biggest thing, I never used Bridge before CS3, but it makes my work so much easier these days I’d cringe not having it for full-time work.

@pattyfab - but a tech at the apple store told me that CS2 adobe bridge will NOT work properly on an intel mac, and CS3 bridge will not work properly on a pre-intel. on his recommendation i uninstalled bridge (only) on those combinations.

anyone with insider knowledge care to clear this up ?

To answer Pattyfab’s quite reasonable objections: yes, if a big-money client wanted it that bad, I would add InDesign, but fortunately my clients are small, not very software-literate themselves, and just want output-ready files for the printer.

The one thing I am deeply grateful to Adobe for is Acrobat—now there’s an application that really transformed our world!

Another Quark 7 user (occasional) here. Nothing against ID, just don’t have it...

Agreed about Acrobat though!

I’m a fully-committed InDesign user that only rarely launches Quark, usually only to re-save old documents into versions that can be converted to InDesign documents.

And it’s a shame, really. Using Quark on a day-to-day basis was a blast. I remember it as one of the most responsive and enjoyable programs I’ve ever used. As gamers would say, it had great “playability.” Working in Quark was like improvising on the piano. It had it’s flaws for certain, but for practiced users it all but disappeared under your hands.

At its height I think Quark enjoyed 85% market share. Unfortunately the company decided to celebrate with intensely predatory pricing, openly hostile customer service and a manic obsession with security. Many of us were openly begging Adobe to hurry up with getting InDesign to market. And I’m sure Quark saw in Adobe the end of their monopolistic spree and tried to squeeze as much out of the market as possible before getting kicked back.
I may be wrong, but it seems that these days most Quark users are holdovers from this earlier era. A majority of working designers have switched to InDesign and, unless I’m mistaken, a majority of formal design education in InDesign as well, so it’s what all the kids are using. But surely somebody becoming acclimated to InDesign and then switching to Quark is rather rare?

I find Adobe Bridge (using CS2 on a pre-Intel mac) sluggish and cumbersome. Every time I have tried to use it I have been frustrated. I actually use iView which is free and less intrusive than iPhoto and lets you organize and view your photos really easily. That is essential for the kind of work I do, which often involves sequencing photos. I set up the sequence in iView and then lay it out in Quark or InD. You can actually drag photos into those programs from iView.

I’m sure Bridge is a fine software and probably just need to sit down with someone who can show me how it is supposed to work.

@Chris - yes, that was what I had heard about intel/non-intel and the various CS versions, which is the main reason I’ve hung onto my CS3 without installing it. Also I really dislike the InDesign Interchange system; wish they had a better way to downsave. In Quark you just downsave and it gives you an alert that you are doing that (which of course you already know) but the file isn’t altered.

Does anyone know

1. If/when there is going to be a Quark 8?

2. Does Quark 7 have compatibility issues with Leopard?

I’m still using Quark for freelance book design and layout projects. Just retired 6.5 and using 7.31 full-time. I also use InDesign CS2. As 95% of the publishers and packagers for whom I work want Quark, I haven’t bothered to upgrade to CS3 yet. Coincidentally, I’m scheduled to start a teacher’s and student’s editions chemistry textbook project end of this week. In InDy. First InDy project in months. I work on a dual-processor G5 running OS 10.4.11.

Yeah, as Steven pointed out, book publishing is still heavily Quark oriented, altho a few of my publishing clients prefer InD.

patty and Steve — I’m curious about this comment on publishers: Don’t they just want a pdf at the end? Why do they care what it is composed in? Genuine questions, not rhetorical.

best

El.

No, they want native files, not a pdf. My clients sometimes make editorial correx themselves too, so they need to be able to work on the files. Also, the printer sometimes has to be able to go into them.

For so long Quark was the only game in town and publishing types are not always the first to jump on a new application.

It depends on the kind of publishing. For the people I work with, Unicode has made workflow so much simpler that basically everyone went to InDesign during the period after the releases of Win2K, OS X, and ID2.0 and before Quark 7.

Hi all,

I am also passionate about InDesign.

Nevertheless I still have to use XPress at home with my R800 Espon (on Classic platform!!;-)
because from InDesign he stamps type (seems to me) as if in bitmap solution while
only Quark (the elder ones) gives me the sharp edged letters.
Don’t know why.
Anyone with the same prob?

Stefan

In 1992 i began with Quark ... and you dont’ want to change what you get used to if there is no need ... there was need 3 years ago. I had to switch to InDesign because of incoming InDesign documents of some clients which i had to handle. I hate learning software and in the beginning it was a hard struggle, but today i like to work with InDesign and don’t look back anymore.

I use both at a master level, they are both necessary. Quark 8 hopefully will be the first update to really add some features. 6.5-7 was a real wasted of time, whooo-hooo, drop shadows! Drop shadows are weeeeeaaaaaaak! A couple of new usability features but I mean come on! The only really great thing about Q7 is the opentype support. InDesign definately takes some time getting used to. And if you don’t like illustrator because it’s not “intuitive” then you need to spend more time learning the apps before you jump right in and work on a job for a client. I can’t actually say i’ve met an app the wasn’t intuitive, other than some raw image processing apps throughout the years. Unfortunately I am not the most common user, I am the type of person who loves finding the limitations in apps in the first 30 minutes of use, then bitching and complaining about the hacks that programmed it to begin with! I have a running joke with some friends that if we ever come across someone involved with programming quark, well you know the rest! lol! :)

Cheers

I dunno, maybe I’m just more of a production type. Yes, I’m more familiar with Quark. Then again, I came to Quark at version 3. I’d been using an old version of PageMaker that limited me to one-page docs, and I was going to be laying out my very first book. This was not a design job. Quark 3 was what the book packager I was subbing the layout work from had their template in.

After awhile PageMaker came out with a version that allowed multi-page docs and books became possible. A non-profit I did book design and layout for over the course of a few years had PageMaker and was not about to spend money and time on the upstart, Quark.

At the time, no one had been dealing with PDFs. This changed for me around 1999. Once I discovered PDFs and printers began accepting them, I tried to send only PDFs to my clients, retaining control over the native files in case of reprints and new editions. I always described them as “cross-platform, printer-ready PDFs,” hoping it wouldn’t occur to the client that most of the value was in the native files.

When InDesign came along, it seemed to be PageMaker on steroids. I learned InDy on version 2, recreating the look of a previously published book’s new edition. It had originally been done in Quark, but whoever had done the first book held on to the native files, so I was hired to create a book that looked like the old one. InDy was easy to learn and use, tho’ through the first CS version I wasn’t much impressed with InDy’s much vaunted type-handling powers. Perhaps it was my growing experience with InDy, but I find that in CS2, I like how it handles type a lot more.

As I said, most of the places for which I work use Quark. If it’s not a design job, but straight book layout, I’m provided a template. 95% of the time the template is still a Quark template.

I love InDesign CS 3 :)

One thing about Quark way over ID, kerning tables, kern once, WOW! Quark prints great, from a production standpoint as well, ID is no slouch, but like a lot of programs, it is not so much better than Quark that easy migration away from Quark. The files I see, are 75% Quark, 22% ID, 3%…you guess. ID is a great legitimate contender, but Quark has not been dethroned as the king of page layout. I’m just happy that PageMaker is finally in the past. It really does not matter which one you choose, they are both great.

The Truth shall set you free

A worrying thing about the Quark v ID issue: a lot of the design colleges only seem to be teaching ID these days. The new crop of design students interning in my neck of the woods don’t have any Quark experience at all, which is a huge disadvantage for them – at least in book design. As Patty so rightly points out, publishers want Quark. It doesn’t matter if ID is more sophisticated (argue this at your leisure), Quark is what they’ve been using for years, and they intend to continue using it. I love ID, but I won’t be uninstalling Quark any time soon!

Adobe has been very aggressive in pursuing academic institutions and indoctrinating students as well as the technology depts, which I’m sure has contributed to that trend. I’m not judging or criticizing, as this is a savvy and successful tactic. When I graduated, Adobe had formed strong ties within our school.

Adobe has long offered an education price. Quark refused to do this, and priced their product so that students simply couldn’t afford it. (In Australia the price was astronomical. Everyone but the big companies seemed to use Pagemaker.) Quark have only themselves to blame for their demise. If students are trained on InD it shouldn’t be too hard for them to adapt to Quark.

One thing about Quark way over ID, kerning tables, kern once, WOW!

Thank you Rodrigue! I’ve been such a broken record on this topic I had to read back through the thread to make sure I wasn’t repeating myself. As far as I know Adobe has no plans to add this feature unless “thousands of users ask for it”, which is a real shame.

See here:
http://www.typophile.com/node/7608

Both apps have their strengths and weaknesses, from small stuff (like why can’t you forward delete in InD) to how annoying it is to add/change a color swatch in Quark. And like Hillary and Obama, they are more alike than different. As I said, my clients use both, I am very fluent in both, and I think a designer does him/herself a disservice by not being able to master both. Quark’s arrogance at the dawn of the OS X era left the door wide open for Adobe to jump in, and luckily for them they got it right. If InD had been just a Pagemaker rehash it would not have caught on. It does seem like the kids are all using InD tho.

I remember about 5 years ago when there was all the agonising over Quark 5, someone posted something a to mac forum about how none of the programmers who had done Quark 4 still worked there — they had all been let go because for a long time there was no work for them to do. So when it came to building Quark 5 there was no one left who had an intimate knowledge of the code. It was outsourced to India and the whole thing had to be coded from scratch. Quark are still recovering from that huge spell where they coasted on their predatory licensing fees.

CEO’s who f***-up as badly as Quark’s did should be able to be sued down the track for the recovery of some of their outrageous salaries. CEO’s seem to be the only people left in the world who get paid whether they are good or whether they are completely crap.

Here in Germany, I think there are very few people using quark. Its all InDesign. I used Quark untill version 4 or 5, then the whole company switched to InDesign, and I havent seen a Quark document in 2 years ;) and frankly, I dont miss it at all.

InDesign is, I believe, more popular in Finland, too. One reason is the slowness of getting a Finnish version of Quark out. I think one version didn’t have a Finnish version at all. The latest localised one just came out, and the translations are slightly amusing. I’m a bit dubious about the proofreading, too.

Yeah, as Steven pointed out, book publishing is still heavily Quark oriented, altho a few of my publishing clients prefer InD.

Years ago I did a Teachers Guide and a Student book to go with it. Built in Quark and it was easy to work with. Currently I am doing a book and doing it in InDesign and it’s not been a pretty picture of smooth sailing. Mostly because I am annoyed with how ID sets up TOC and Indexes.

OK I just figured out something I find VERY problematic about InDesign (and which is requiring a lot of extra work on my part).

When you create a Character Style, InD assigns it leading. If you then go back and change the leading of the Paragraph Style, the leading of the Character Style will override it. What the hell is up with that? In Quark, the Paragraph Style contains the leading, the point of Character Style is to apply it only to certain characters or words within the paragraph, not to affect the attributes of the paragraph itself.

I also find it odd that you can change the leading of only one line of a paragraph in InD. In Quark you simply have to place your curser anywhere in the paragraph (or line if it’s one line long) and you can change the leading. In InD you have to select the entire bloody thing.

Plus - why isn’t there a key command action in InD to call up the “Text Frame Options” pane? That is a very useful pane, and it drives me nuts to have to go to the menu each time.

OK griping over for now.

Those are just a couple of things that bug me about InDesign, Patty. I have a whole list. But most of my students use InD — and very few use Quark — primarily because they usually purchase the whole suite.

By and large, I really like InD. I’m just kind of bugged by all the anti-Quark sentiment on this forum, mostly I suspect by people who probably never really used it much before they started using InD. As I said above, there are way more similarities than differences btw the apps. They are both wonderful, useful applications, but both have significant weaknesses.

New York finally has some serious snow! Of course it’s supposed to melt later today.

Patty —

The leading thing can be turned off: Preferences > Type — check “Apply Leading to Entire Paragraphs” under Type Options. This will give you behavior more like Quark’s. I don’t know why this is off by default. I always tell my designers to change their default preferences to have this option turned on.

BTW, I was an avid Quark user for many years, and even though I’ve been using primarily InDesign for the past few years, it’s still not as fast and efficient as I was in Quark. At first I chalked it up to learning curve. But after a couple years, it seems to me that there are just several basic day-in-day-out actions that require more mousing and menu-hunting in InDesign than in Quark, no way around it.

Now that Q7 supports OT, I should get back into it.

— K.

In regards to schools and students using InDesign exclusively, Speak Up recently touched on the subject by posting the question: Do students need to learn Quark?

I was surprised at how vehement many of the responders were in saying Quark was dead and you need not bother learning it.

http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/004449.html

And yet on this forum, Quark seems to be alive (or at least treading water)....

Kent - THANKS! Big help.

I also only just learned about that thingie at the top left that stops InD centering everything. I am self-taught so I missed a lot of tips and tricks. Tiffany and Linda have been getting me up to speed on some of them.

One HUGE InD advantage is the ability to have your bleed marks automatically.

Patty, possibly this helps, too:

Character styles in InDesign are a different cup of tea compared to Quark and some other programs: In Indesign they report only the differences between them and the paragraph style. So a paragraph style can contain e.g. simply a different color or size, nothing else.

Just try e.g. creating a character style based on a word which is marked bold. When looking into the new character style dialog box, all of the definition fields are empty, there is only one field with “bold” in it.

This means, if you don’t specify the leading in the character style dialog box, the leading of the paragraph style will be applied unchanged.

I’ve found using stone implements superior to Quark. I enjoy being able to cut-and-paste most vectors from Illustrator, and transparency support (if this has changed in quark, I am unaware). I have found Indesign all around easier to use in every way shape and form than Quark. The only thing InDesign should have is Quark’s key command to make a alien come onto the screen to delete an object (anyone else ever see that?)

I thought a really funny part about quarks ad campaign a few years back is that they were boasting “multiple undos.” That’s kinda like trying to sell a car merely on the merit it has brakes.

There are 2 places where an alien appears in InDesign CS3 — the print dialog and the about box. Google can help with the details...

Eric, some very experienced book designers here on Typophile—Patty, above, and Charles Ellertson—have pointed to Quark’s ability to adjust kerning globally in a font as a key thing they miss in InDesign.

Several have made clear also that book publishing—in the US at any rate—is where adoption of InDesign has been much slower. Will it really take thousands of people to ask for this before it happens in InDesign, as someone said above? I would think that for marketing InDesign to book designers this would be worthwhile, but I have no idea how much programming is involved.

Perhaps some useful script can be found in the scripts list provided by the swiss user forum “hilfdirselbst”:

KerningOrNoBreak.js
Weist definierten Zeichenfolgen (extern) entweder automatischen Kerning oder das Zeichenattribut “Kein Umbruch” zu.
(applies automatic kerning or the character style “no break” to externally pre-defined strings of characters)

KerningSuchen.js
Ermöglicht das Suchen nach definierten Kerningwerten.
(enables seeking for pre-defined kerning values)

see here: http://hilfdirselbst.org/index1.php?read_article=16

In response to William -
I totally agree and we have heard about built-in kern pair editing from multiple sources; I remember the childrens’ books publishers being especially persuasive. I could deliver the normal “resource constraints” and “feature trade-off” excuses but the biggest reason why this feature is difficult for us is that we feel it would be a mistake to have a kern pair editor that could not share the updated kerning with at least Illustrator & Photoshop. That makes InDesign’s ranking of the feature less of a determining factor. We are still working on the global solution and we’re trying to assist plugin developers who are working on InDesign-only solutions.

Eric, thank you for the first valid explanation I have yet to receive as to why InDesign doesn’t have kerning pairs. But I will say that since Illustrator and P-shop are not really designed for typesetting it seems to me this feature is less significant there. Not a good reason to hold up implementing it in InD.

This means, if you don’t specify the leading in the character style dialog box, the leading of the paragraph style will be applied unchanged.

The way I create style sheets is to mock up a design I like and then select the various elements one by one and make style sheets directly from them. I don’t know if everyone works this way, but it was a feature of Quark too and it is infinitely easier than creating style sheets from scratch.

What happened was that I created a paragraph style sheet for recipe directions and then a character style sheet for the step numbers. I didn’t do anything to the leading when I did that. I later changed the leading in the paragraph style sheet, and it didn’t occur to me that I then had to change it in the character style sheet as well. And then I didn’t notice for a long time that the char. style sheet was overriding the paragraph style sheet and inserting an additional point of lead. Lots of work to go back and fix alignments and such.

Although Miguel is an Adobe employee, and a really clever guy, he was overstating the case when he said that it would take “thousands” of requests to get a saved-kern-pairs functionality into InDesign.

If this is something you (anyone reading this) care about, it’s a matter of moments to fill out the feature request form, here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

I know for a fact that InDesign product management looks at every request that comes in for InDesign.

Cheers,

T

Thomas, thanks. As Miguel suggested in the earlier thread, I did post a request directly to Adobe. I encourage Rodrigue and anyone else who misses this feature in InDesign to do the same.

Yes, “thousands” was an overstatement, but having a thousand requests for this feature will definitely help the product managers realize how important it is, and therefore instruct the engineers to implement it sooner. That said, the more the better!

On Adobes website there is this plug-in:
http://www.knowbody.dk
Looks ok, but runs 100 USD for kerning, then 100 USD for tracking, and on first blush, not as intuitive as Quarks.
Patty, it is obvious to me that Adobe does not care about this feature, it should have been included in PageMaker! If Adobe wishes not to recognize a feature that would actually pull potential clients away from their biggest rival, why would I want to put in a feature request? This should have been foundational in V1 or 1.5.
Chipman: Do you really think IDs counter intuitive box implementation is better than Quarks simple one? After 8 years of V1, V2, CS, CS2 and CS3, I still do not get it, or see its benefit, it is clumsy to me.
Ultimately, anyone can make either product work quite well, but who does not get miffed when a feature is left out of a competing product, which claims so much superiority.
As many here have pointed out that Quark so inept, why can’t Adobe match this feature? If you believe the engineers at Adobe are so much better than what is coming out of Quark, what is the hold up?
Some time back people on Typophile were posting how backward Quark is/was, but to me features of basic typographical control are far more important than transparency, because I can use PhotoShop for most any transparency. There are some features that I love in ID, like the measurement box with 9 points in it, it is great, so precise for print production, far superior to Quark.
The Truth shall set you free

I’m using Quark. Have been using 4.1 on a Mac G4 for years. It’s brilliant *in as much that* it’s very fast and although it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, I can create just about every visual effect that v7 can by way of close integration with Photoshop and Illustrator without spending TOO much extra time on things. Now I’m using v7 on an iMac 2.8GHz (2Gb RAM). Oh dear...

I’m sick to the back teeth of it. It garbles bitmap TIF files and the only way I can get the images to reproduce properly is by replacing them with .psd files, which adds a lot of extra weight to the documents. THEN there’s the issue of PDF creation - it’s cr@p, cr@p, cr@p!!!

Quark 4 - make your document. Utilities -> create PDF; wait while Quark creates a reasonably sized EPS file, opens Distiller automatically, produces PDF file incredibly efficiently.

Quark 7 - make document while having to work around its flaws, including the problem just mentioned. File -> Export to PDF. Wait while Quark creates an impossibly huge EPS file (a looooooooong time...) and then be amazed when after a similarly lengthy amount of time, a PDF of totally unusable file size has been produced. Doing it through Distiller doesn’t make the file much smaller, but does reduce the time the PDF stage takes considerably. But it’s the EPS file creation that is the real killer - I’m getting Gb sized files.

I’ve pulled my hair out trying to get to the bottom of all of this via various forum discussion - it scares me just how many people come up against this. Does anyone here have any ideas? I’m finding all this pathetic. I have InDesign now. I’m not using it in anger yet, but the beauty of it being able to seemingly easily convert my Quark 4 files is looking all too appealing...

help!

Can you please create a new thread? Then I’ll come back with my ideas.

Although you sounds pretty frazzled so I will suggest just flattening your photoshop files. And can’t you print directly to distiller? I haven’t used Quark for year. Or you can print to a .PS (postscript) file instead of .EPS no?

Now that we have Quark 8, has anyone changed their opinion/position re the Quark vs. InDesign debate?

Why not wait three weeks and compare it to InDesign CS4?

T

i’m one of those kids who does not know quark well, i used it a few times in my first job, but they preferred indesign, so i used that, and since then every place i’ve worked has pretty much just used the creative suite. for me now, quark is just an extra expense i can’t justify when i can do almost everything with indesign.

that said, i would love to get into the publishing industry, so if most publishers are using quark, i’d be happy to learn it.

I’ve been using Quark since ’89. Also use InDesign CS3. Have Quark 8.

I love the typographic control of Quark. Can’t beat the ability to quickly make changes and design with your keyboard, rather than a clumsy mouse or even turbomouse as you need to mostly do in InDesign.