Quark vs. InDesign

Alright, after 11 years of using Quark I've been using InDesign for a couple months.

I like the program a whole lot, but a couple things nag me (though I trust all of the geniuses on here will be able to point me in the right direction .)

• When I cut an entire line and paste it over the line immediately above it, it leaves one space in front of the line directly below the line cut. Extremely annoying.

• Quark's system of cutting and pasting photos from photo boxes was much better (again, unless I'm missing something). In Quark, if you had a mugshot to the side of the page and wanted to put that pic into a mugshot dummy box ON your page, you apple-x the old one and apple-v into the new one.

In InDesign, it seems as though you can't really do that ... you have to select the box you want and import it. Not that big of a deal, but seconds add up to minutes add up to hours over the long, long haul.

• If you want to do drop caps to open a story in InDesign, you can't have the bottom of the big character match up with the bottom of the opening line like you can in Quark. All the drop cap options have the top of the big letter matching up with the top of the first line and going down from there. I have to do a 25-point character style to get around that.

• Most frustrating, though, is my inability to edit/remove paragraph rules (this may be because we based our initial ID files off Quark files). If you select the type and go to paragraph rules, everything's grayed out like there's nothing there in the first place.

Sorry this got to be so long. I love InDesign ... way better features than our dog-ass version of Quark. But then a dozen or so years of technology will do that

 

Umpteenth thread on this topic ... but that's OK.

I was the Eddie Van Halen of Quark, and now I'm the Kevin Federline of InDesign.

I feel so inadequate.

 

I didn't know there were other threads on it. I guess I'll have to do a search in the next little while. We'll be switching over before year's end.

 

has Quark come out with an OS X version that actually works?

InDesign is a superior program, IMO, but for newspaper layout, the simplicity of Quark might be better. However, unless Quark works for OS X, it's a moot point.

 

I'm on Quark 4.1 for like Mac OS 2 or some horribly old ass OS. At some point to be determined we're supposed to go PC and InDesign, as will apparently half of all newspapers this year. InDesign looks way cooler than Quark (at least the old Quark I'm using), but I'm a Bear of Very Little Brain, and large design systems Bother me. Someone's going to have to hold my hand through the process, and she needs to be hot.

 

if you're on Mac 2.0, you really need help. you might be stuck in 1985 in a time warp.

 

Ha ha, I feel your pain. Mac OS 9.1 with Quark 3 here.

 

Wow. That's all I can say. And I'll say it again -- wow.

 

We're at Mac OS 9.2 with Quark 4.11, and I don't think this paper will invest the money to go OSX any time soon. It works fine for pagination, but other applications, particularly internet-wise, we're in the stone ages.

 

We're also on OS 9.2 and Quark 4.1. It's impossible to do much on the Internet. I'm currently using Mozilla 1.2 or something like that because Internet Explorer doesn't display pages correctly and it constantly crashes my machine.

But it's ok because we're getting new computers in March 2006. Is it March 2006 yet?

 

Oh yeah?? Well, I'm the Jimi Hendrix of Quark, looking forward to being the Justin Timberlake of InDesign. : :

 

Yup. We're supposed to be getting outfitted with ... well ... not necessarily new but new to us computers soon. And then we're switching to InDesign.