InDesign

[Versatile]

Even aside from the streamlining with Photoshop and Illustrator, InDesign is significantly smoother and more versatile than Quark.

 

[The Big Ragu]

There was a time in the early 2000s, when I was doing magazines, when I could have never imagined anything taking away the market from Quark. It's stunning just how unable they were to keep what they had. Too stodgy, too slow innovating and too slow keeping up with what Adobe did with InDesign.

Quark's decline has very little to do with the lack of innovation in its desktop publishing program and a lot more to do with Adobe having a much more diversified business from the very beginning, when Photoshop, Illustrator and other core CS products were first developed.

Individually, QuarkXPress and InDesign aren't that different, which is why we've all been able to transfer skills from one program to the other so easily.

But what makes InDesign (and the whole Creative Suite) so powerful is that Adobe is able to integrate all its products together — products that Quark had little interest in developing on its own. Adobe's been developing them since the late 1980s. Its dominance was a foregone conclusion. Once Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2003, there was no question that Quark was doomed.

The integration with Photoshop, which I pointed out in my post, was a major selling point for InDesign. But Quark was really slow to innovate, too, and InDesign introduced a lot of features that Quark took forever to keep pace with. In particular, InDesign allowed you to import graphics with layers and turn them on and off. And this was a biggie for stuff we were doing -- Quark took forever to introduce simple drop shadows. The last few versions of Quark we worked with where also incredibly buggy compared to InDesign. Of course it helped Adobe that InDesign integrated so well with Photoshop and Illustrator and they took market share by bundling them in creative suites. But Quark did a crappy job of seeing what was happening to its brand and investing to keep what it had taken so long to get. If you remember the days of Quark having the whole market, it really is stunning how far they fell -- really from around 2003 on, when Adobe came out with CS.

 

[Football_Bat]

We switched from Quark to InDesign at some point in 2006 (during the summer, thank goodness), and the transition was an extreme pain in the ass. It's all good now, but I remember bitching about some of the handy Quark features that went away. Cutline info used to drag with the art, for example.

 

[Drip]

InDesign is pretty cool to work with. It has some quirks, like every system but NO BEACH BALLS!!!!!!

 

[Football_Bat]

I miss the Martian that came out on shift-option-Apple K.

 

[JayFarrar]

I miss the Martian that came out on shift-option-Apple K.

I remember the first time I did that, by accident, in Quark then the screen melted and I had an absolute freak out.

The most frustrating thing about InDesign is you lose the ability to backstep. So If someone sends you a document made in 5.5 you can't open it with 5 and so forth.

It can be a real pain in the ass.

My place uses ID for pages, and Quark for the Classified pages. Going back and forth between programs will give you a headache.

 

[jr/shotglass]

Heh. Consider doing ID on all the pages except the agate, which is still done on the being-phased-out Harris system.

(Oh, yeah. The agate guys work in a different building than us.)

 

[spikechiquet]

I miss the Martian that came out on shift-option-Apple K.

<img src="http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/kuUe8_lvQTE/hqdefault.jpg">
In college, if a newbie paginator asked how to use a shortcut key for something...anything, they could ask how to shortcut key save...we would tell them this...just to freak them out.

 

[JRoyal]

http://www.eeggs.com/tree/325.html

Easter eggs for InDesign. Not as easy as the Quark alien, but the butterfly one is kinda fun. I couldn't get a couple to work.

 

[JayFarrar]

I just tried to make the Christmas lights. I couldn't make it go in 4.

 

[JRoyal]

That one worked for me in CS4. Did you have it set to Dash under type?