t/s: Quark v. InDesign

I haven't used Quark in...4+ years or so. I really liked 3.1 but after 5 they started making it...weird. Or DO I believe Quark versions 5+ are lousy because that's the general meme of the modern day? Is it genuinely on par with InDesign and InDesign's just become the industry standard bcz of the towering might of Adobe? I've been using InDesign lately (learned abt 4 mos ago & I'm by no means an expert) and I think it might be 'better,' like everyone says. I don't really know enough re: InDesign to make a boss comparison.

Anyway, blah blah, which one do you guys prefer?

been on InDesign for 4/5 years now. i knew almost immediately that i'd rather being using it instead of Quark.

no contest - InDesign. (granted i haven't so much as touched Quark for years)

InDesign

HEY I HAF A QUESTION. One of our desginers is freaking out about a job that's just been converted from Quark to InDes because she says the programs "handle color differently" and we are starting a whole crazy system of proofing to make her happy. Can someone PLEASE explain some of the truth of this/reasons for it/strategies for coping?

Same answer as Thermo except I switched about 6 years ago.

InDesign, and I still use both (Quark 6.5 and InDesign CS3 currently). Quark 8 has some cool features and ways of handling advanced features, but it's too little, too late. Even if it was a better program and you felt more comfortable with it, it's worthless because everybody's already switched to InDesign.

InDesign annoys me in some ways, but it's still massively better.

When you say handles color differently, do you mean of color swatches or of placed images? There may be some weird issues about how color profiles are treated or how a pantone color is broken down, but in any case the solution is always "get used to InDesign". I remember for a few years it was a hassle that you'd pick a pantone in Illustrator then pick the same pantone in Quark, then break them down to CMYK in each program and the results would be different. In any case, you shouldn't bother with breaking down pantone colors, you should just use Pantone process colors to begin with.

I have a copy of QuarkXPress 6 staring at me like 'Abbott give me a roll' and I'm like 'dude I already have InDesign open you better give me a damn good reason' and then it just sits there, and I'm like "dude I know you are a Genesis fan QuarkXPress 6 but you don't have to be that hardcore abt 'no reply at all'."

Jesus, they still make Quark?

InDesign functions about 10,000 times better with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat. You can create and edit vector images much more easily in it. It's basically industry standard.

And yes, it does handle color differently. Particularly when dealing with gradients and transparencies.

Specifically very carefully color-corrected hi-res art files, Dan. Not PMS inks here.

My understanding is that, for all intents and purposes, Quark still exists because there are businesses that have used Quark forever and don't want to give it up. Based on the very few times that I've used Quark in recent years, it's weird and counterintuitive and I don't like it. Not to mention the fact that it (obviously) doesn't get along with other Adobe products as well as InDesign does. I would argue for maintaining some familiarity with Quark on the off-chance that you wind up doing any work for one of those companies that still uses Quark (as I did a year-and-a-half ago), but outside of that I'd happily flush it down the terlet.

I learned Quark when I was 16 so I'm kind of like 'awwwwww' abt it but otoh we did LOGO in sixth grade and I'm never like 'damn I wish I cld move that little turtle around.' Or as they say in Corinthians, "but when I became a man, I put away childish things." I think this is what it comes down to, for me.

Is it even worth it to put Quark skills on a resume or is that too anachronistic now?

For the record, the newer versions of Quark do a great deal of the same cool things that you love InDesign for...but that doesn't matter because everywhere I've seen that still uses Quark is still using 6.5.

As far as handling placed hi-res art files it shouldn't handle them differently far as I can understand, unless there's some color profile issues going on.

Yes, it's worth putting the skills down, a lot of bigtime places still pay decent money to work in old versions of Quark. And it's work, if you can get it.

xp Abbott, for variety and showing you managed to make the 'switch' maybe?

My story's the same as others here, InDesign all the way. I did a lot of lay-out work for the newspaper with Quark, but this was six or seven years ago. InDesign won by a mile.

and I have to say, while I'm mostly glad to see Quark go due to all the pain it's given me over the years, it's a bit of a shame because while I know how to use InDesign decently well, I'm a fucking wizard with Quark. People have watched me work on layouts and said they've never seen anyone faster. A real artist. My only talent. So sad.

i miss the alien.

I used to have fun with him but once I was stressing out and rushing on some job and brought him up by accident and I had to sit there and wait for him to finish his destructive duties and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

I think the alien is the best Easter egg in any program.

I think I was trying to access preferences and not the robot. Y instead of K.

InDesign is definitely the better app -- but it took a good while to get used to the way it thinks: the digital paste-up metaphor is much stronger with Quark, so it's easier to get your head around.

And I *really* don't like the way it uses plain letters for keyboard shortcuts. That's just asking for a stray character to get into your text. I gave black arrow a keyboard shortcut to sort this and ended up with a nervous tic of pressing it every time I'd finished editing copy.

Am pretty glad Quark's dying given all the shit they've given their users over the years -- despite them having to fight Pagemaker viciously to win the market, as soon as they got it they sat on their laurels and did nowt except introduce new bugs, a weird way of doing tables and then fire all their developers. Still, it's not like I have any spare love for Adobe, either.

never met anyone who likes quark better than indesign

(that said I do vastly prefer Quark's way of having a teeny tiny measurements panel and toolbox and everything else handled with dialog boxes, as this lets you basically work it entirely by keyboard. You can imitate this a bit by showing/hide InDesign's 1000 palettes, but it's not as robust. Still, they made the measurements panel and toolbox fat and bloaty in the OS X versions, so fuck 'em.)

xp

And I *really* don't like the way it uses plain letters for keyboard shortcuts. That's just asking for a stray character to get into your text. I gave black arrow a keyboard shortcut to sort this and ended up with a nervous tic of pressing it every time I'd finished editing copy.

No kidding. At least once a month, I nearly include a random "w" in copy when going in and out of preview modes.

trick there is to always hit "esc" to knock you back to the black arrow...no keyboard shortcut needed.

as much as I hate indesign's millions of palettes, the fact that it avoids dialog boxes more often is helpful. For years while using quark I dreamed of the day I'd be able to click on an image and see it in picture usage without having to F13.

Ha. That explains the stray w's I have to pick out of the files every once in awhile when I'm uploading our publications to the Internet.

InDesign.

trick there is to always hit "esc" to knock you back to the black arrow...no keyboard shortcut needed.
Left-handed mouser here, so esc is a pain. I set it to "insert" instead, but that bit me when I did it by habit in other apps, duh.

For years while using quark I dreamed of the day I'd be able to click on an image and see it in picture usage without having to F13
You can double-click on it and get more info than Usage shows. Miss this in InDesign a lot too. Can never recall exactly which 8x8 icon I have to hit to update.

My understanding is that, for all intents and purposes, Quark still exists because there are businesses that have used Quark forever and don't want to give it up.

OTM. Printers are a strange lot and for an industry that depends entirely on high-speed tech they are also afraid of any kind of change. Even now, it's still pretty common to hear "why can't you run OS 9 on the new Mac towers? I don't want any of that OS X crap for end users"

Quark though, wow. There really needs to be some sort of business textbook written about them as the cautionary tale on how to successfully ruin a product with a 90% marketshare. In the space of a few years, here's what Quark did to kill themselves:

- Hired Fred Ebrahimi as CEO. He's been described as "a gentleman whose outbursts make Steve Jobs seem like Captain Kangaroo."
- Fired all (yes, 100% all) the programmers from the main Denver office and hired all new programmers in India.
- Wasted a lot of time on Xposure: Quark's version of Photoshop. Yeah, like anyone who uses Photoshop is going to switch. I don't believe this product ever actually shipped.
- Ignorance of PDF. Quark never saw PDF as something other than a new Adobe format and so ignored it. Sure, there was a "PDF exporter" Xpress extension but it barely worked and produced horrid PDFs.
- CEO Ebrahimi making statements about how "publishing was dying." Way to talk to your core users dude!
- More time wasted on Quark Publishing System, QuarkImmedia (sort of a Flash-like multimedia authoring package) and mTropolis (another multimedia authoring package). All of these were eventually abandoned. Meanwhile, QuarkXpress lays dormant for six years with no major update.
- Still more time wasted (most of 1998) on a takeover bid for Adobe. Yeah right.
- Even more time wasted on a Web authoring package (think this was called Troika) that was never released.
- When Xpress is finally updated, no upgrade path is offered. Pay full retail price suckers. Also, no native-Carbon support for Mac OS X. Ebrahimi says "the Mac is dying, so if you want to complain use something else"

Lots of people follow his words and switch to InDesign. Those first versions of InDesign weren't very good at all but to be fair, Adobe might be arrogant, but they do continually improve their software (despite Illustrator 7).

Full disclosure: I work for a pretty large commercial printer. Quark has been banned from the premises for years.

BTW, if you're interested in Quark vs. InDesign minutiae check out: http://www.quarkvsindesign.com

Here's the kind of press Quark gets these days (this is from 2005)

SAS Nagar/Chandigarh, December 5: “My son was to migrate to Dubai with his entire family. He had got a job in another reputed company and was even ready to pay all his dues to this company,’’ said father of Sukhvinderjit Singh, an electrical engineer working with Quark Media House Private Limited, who was murdered last night.

Sukhvinderjit was shot dead last night around 10.30 p.m. near Doon School in Mohali, when he was out for a post-dinner walk with his wife.

The family is yet to voice its opinion firmly, but their suspicions zero on certain well-placed officials in Quark, who, they say, were ‘‘jealous of Sukhvinderjit’s professional growth’’.

Sukhvinderjit was suspended recently on charges of embezzlement. He had to submit an affidavit admitting to the same to the company’s inquiry committee. The family says he was innocent and was lately threatening to expose the actual people involved.

Sukhvinderjit was working with Quark for the last six years and his brother, Gurvinder, who had come from the United States, had joined the company last year as a Project Manager.

Gurvinder said: ‘‘As he was an extremely soft-spoken person and used to always avoid arguments, he might have decided to settle all the monetary disputes with the company and admitted to what he had not even done.’’

Significantly, the two brothers had gone to meet Quark Chairman Fred Ibrahimi at his residence yesterday evening.

‘‘We both went together to Fred’s residence. There was a meeting of certain officials of the company. I met Fred, but he refused to meet Sukhvinderjit. So we returned,’’ said Gurvinder.

The Newsline team called up Ibrahimi, but he refused to comment.

Quark MD (Projects), Paramjit Singh Sehgal, said: ‘‘I was not part of the inquiry committee. But we have given the copy of the inquiry report and Sukhvinderjit’s confession to the police. They are investigating the matter and it will not be appropriate for me to give any details at this stage’’.

Surprisingly, barring a few employees, no senior personnel of the company was present at Sukhvinderjit’s cremation today.

Sukhvinderjit was a fitness freak and regularly went for evening and post-dinner walks. Many people knew about his habit, said the family.

IG (Zonal) SM Sharma said: ‘‘We have constituted several teams and allotted them different tasks. Questioning of Quark officials is included in our course of investigation, but there are several other theories too, about which I cannot divulge details, as it will be too premature to say anything now.’’

The Quark, after its inception in 2003 in Mohali, has been surrounded by controversies. About 150 employees were retrenched in this February and 50 more were sacked in March. The officials termed this as an internal matter

In February, the then Fire Station Officer of SAS Nagar, B S Sandhu, objected to the No Objection Certificate to the Quark on the grounds that the company, an industrial unit, was also planning to construct clubs, cinema halls and residential units in the vicinity of factories that have highly-explosive chemicals. Interestingly, the Punjab government transferred Sandhu. Moreover, Chief Fire Officer Lakhvinder Singh, who raised an objection, was suspended

In March 2005, the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB), Patiala, issued a public notice to the company, saying an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) clearance is necessary from the Central Ministry of Environment and Forests for all construction projects in the country with an investment of Rs 50 crore and above or that employ over 1,000 persons.

AT the Post Graduate Institute of Medicine (PGI) and Government Hospital, Sector 16, authorities added harassment to the agony of Sukhvinderjit’s parents.

They had to ferry his body from one hospital to the other for the postmortem.

After the shooting, Sukhvinderjit was brought to PGI, where the doctors declared him brought dead. The body was kept in PGI and the family was told that the post-mortem would be done in the morning.

However, in the morning, the hospital authorities refused, saying the spot where the crime took place was not under their jurisdiction.

‘‘I pleaded the PGI officials to take the organs of my son, so that needy patients could benefit,’’ said tearful Inderjit Singh, father of the deceased, to Newsline. ‘‘I was ready to give my and my family’s consent, but to no avail.’’

After failing to persuade the PGI authorities, the family brought the body to General Hospital, Sector 16. Here too, the officials refused, citing the same reason.

‘‘Finally, we brought the body to Civil Hospital, Phase VI, Mohali, where the post-mortem was done and we brought our son home,’’ Inderjit Singh said. ‘‘I don’t understand why the postmortem was not done at PGI, when the body was lying there overnight?’’.

Quark’s Chairman Fred Ibrahimi and MD (Projects) Paramjit Singh Sehgal were present at PGI Emergency yesterday night. However, they left before the police arrived.

what do when people want to send u quark files - ask for pdfs?

I know you can double click on an image but that just brings up another window, the point is to be able to click around and see the name change, like in InDesign. The flipside is great two. But yeah, I always forget which of those icons is update, which is go to picture and which is relink!

and yeah, you can ask for pdfs...but I would not trust 99% of the people out there to make a PDF from Quark and have it be printable. And I'm not blaming Quark but the fact that most designers don't understand how to prepare files for print, so you don't want to trust them making hi-res PDFs, usually.

what do when people want to send u quark files - ask for pdfs?

I usually ask that they convert the file to a lithograph or woodcut.

Quark Publishing System
Srsly OTM on the rest, but this is actually still going, and it's relatively good. There's a really nice plugin system thingy for the Mac that lets apps store their documents in its version control system seamlessly. Quark CopyDesk is a bit crash happy, but compared to the Atex system we replaced QPS with at my last paper, I know which I'd take.

what do when people want to send u quark files - ask for pdfs?

PDFs all the way. Pre-flighting and automation tools are eons easier (we deal with thousands of orders a day)

I usually ask that they convert the file to a lithograph or woodcut.

oh people do that...

http://www.briarpress.org/15868

Also, we're processing jobs from other printers (who usually have a clue on how to make a good PDF) and not from end users.

as long as it's not the newest version (iirc) you can convert quark to InDesign. last time i did it we had a few glitches, but it worked.

xposts!

i wind up with random spaces in my copy thanks to the plain letter short cut.

what do when people want to send u quark files - ask for pdfs?

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, July 22, 2009 4:41 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i say, how are u emailing me from the year 1996!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I usually release personal files to printers as PDF-x1As, but sometimes when you're dealing with files created in templates, it's worth knowing to make the template it's own spot and make sure it's set to overprint and not knockout, and I've worked with printer-supplied templates that just used a CMYK dieline to show you and had not other means on the page to relate to the placement. When you have designers who don't think about this stuff, or don't even know to add bleed, then getting a PDF would seem more frustrating then native files, where the fixes are easier.

End users should stick with native files until they know a few things.

what do when people want to send u quark files - ask for pdfs?

Wow, that just never comes up. Last time somebody tried to send me a native QXP file was...2002? Back when I was using Quark, anyway.

Funny to think I was one of the first people to send InDesign files to the printer in Missouri we use...they beta tested a lot of their prepress processes on me when the tide started turning against QXP.

Quark Publishing System
Srsly OTM on the rest, but this is actually still going, and it's relatively good.

Acha. I didn't know it was still kicking around. I did get a chance to use Quark 8 recently and it was probably the best Quark release in years.

printers are gonna be getting quark files until the earth is eaten by the sun - im sure people still try to send pagemaker

----------------------

And I'm not blaming Quark but the fact that most designers don't understand how to prepare files for print, so you don't want to trust them making hi-res PDFs, usually.

― dan selzer, Wednesday, July 22, 2009 4:46 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

eh any printer can just send out a custom pdf profile

I am kinda surprised and pleased to see that FrameMaker is still kicking around. Used FM a lot back during my NeXT days.

Anyway, if it wasn't obvious I'm a InDesign user all the way.

QUARK SUCKS

eh any printer can just send out a custom pdf profile

beyond how the pdf is distilled, I'm talking about the way the file is built to begin with, stuff that maybe isn't as easy to fix with Pitstop or whatever.

My wife is in the industry so this is one step removed, but she prefers InDesign about 5000 times more than Quark these days for most of the reasons detailed above. She was freelancing at a number of different places, and while there were way more InDesign houses at the end of her freelancing days (she's gone full-time), Quark still ruled at a number of places because of inertia: companies didn't want to (or couldn't afford to) upgrade all their machines to OS X...and some were still trying to do the work on hardware that was just not capable of running anything other than Quark 5. That's the only reason Quark holds on at all.

beyond how the pdf is distilled, I'm talking about the way the file is built to begin with, stuff that maybe isn't as easy to fix with Pitstop or whatever.

― dan selzer, Wednesday, July 22, 2009 5:04 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

curious what can one do to fuck this up - ive had a some printers ask me for pdfs - i didnt take any special precautions and it worked out fine - besides having to create send them more pdfs for corrections instead of just asking them to fix small thinks on their end

Did you add bleed? Something as simple as that.

But also stuff like what I mentioned above regarding dielines in templates.

alright i think were talking abt the same thing as far as pdfs being harder to fix on the printers end - i was thinking youre saying theres mistakes thatd show up only in a pdf

No, the former. That it's easier for printers to edit native files then PDFs and that many average users shouldn't be trusted with creating hi-res PDFs, as easy as it seems.

on the other hand instead of fixing it themselves the printer can just email the designer and demand a new pdf - which depending how much hand holding the designer needs could be easier

i dealt w/this huge ass printer for a while that only took pdfs and that seemed to be their motivation

Quark is still around? ID, duh.

there's definitely no one answer. It depends as much on the knowledge of the designer as the methods of the printer...and sometimes the knowledge of the printer. My first job was doing preflight at a service bureau and I think about it now and how little I knew what I was doing. So now I send stuff out and have people who work at printers making complaints or bouncing things and not always but surprisingly often, it's there error and I know more about the process then they do.

and I mean no one answer regarding workflow, not regarding Quark vs. InDesign. For that, there's definitely an answer.

Astounding how thoroughly Quark bungled things-- eye-opening stuff, Elvis Telecom.

While unemployed, I decided to get familiar with Quark so I could add it to my resume. Did the free trial download of the latest Quark, got a book. By the end of it, I ran back sniveling to InDesign. Quark is tragic in comparison. I would be seriously wary of an employer who was insistent on using Quark over InDesign.

Quark only makes sense if you've been using it for years, and all the new features are added in ways that try to not mess with the basic interface as defined in 3.32 or whatever, so if you are a seasoned Quark user, version 8 is pretty awesome, but pointless because nobody else is using it and because if you can just get used to InDesign, you'll prefer it anyway, except for a few minor things (paste into???) but you get used to them.

yeah, having QuarkXPress 8 on my resume did not do me any good. *snort* Nah, I didn't actually specify 8 on my resume but I suppose I would have looked pretty stupid if it had come up in an interview.

dan-- I guess from the above that you think Quark has a better workflow. Care to elaborate for the post-Quark people?

I've been using Quark 3 and 4 on pre OS-X Macs at a local newspaper for over 10 years, so I find I can work quicker on Quark, but if given the choice it's Indesign all the way, there really is no comparison.

I've been using Quark 3 and 4 on pre OS-X Macs at a local newspaper for over 10 years

Shit, really? Which one, where? I thought Stet and I were the only people in that boat (and even that came to an end some 18 months ago.)

On which note: Stet, remember that time that you and I found ourselves in a windowless room with a Quark representative? And let him leave without his having sustained any form of testicular bruising at all? God DAMN, we missed a trick.

Anyway. At work I moved from Quark 4 and 3.32 and a QPS back-end to InDesign v.whatever and an Atex Prestige back-end; oh, and from Mac OS 9 to Windows XP at the same time. Even accounting for the fact that Prestige is a lovely idea terribly executed, and Windows is a heap of festering shit, there's still no contest: InDesign is a vastly superior product. Until this thread, I've always qualified that with "Of course, I've not used a version of Quark later than v4"; I'm obviously not missing very much at all, eh?

The things I do miss about Quark are invariably related to keyboard shortcuts and workflow; again, the Windows/Mac and QPS/Prestige differences are confounding variables of such magnitude as to be responsible for pretty much all of that. I was astonished at how quickly I could sit down in front of InDesign and knock up something that looked exactly like what I'd just done in Quark; I have a sneaking suspicion I couldn't go back and do the opposite with nearly the same ease.

of course the thing that makes this discussion interesting is that theyre two v v similar programs - i mean when i first picked up indesign after working in quark for a few years i could use it right away - things would come up that i didnt know how to do but they were easy enough to figure out

quark is like a muscle car...it's not good for much and it'll break down a lot but if you know how to use it for the thing that it's good at and you've been using it that way for 20 years, it can be a thing of beauty whereas InDesign is like a german car with lots of features but sometimes you have to crack open the manual and wonder why there are 4 different ways to turn on the defrost and none of them quite make sense.

Now, I've never driven a muscle car or a mercedes and totally made that up, but I think it makes sense.

I've been using Quark 3 and 4 on pre OS-X Macs at a local newspaper for over 10 years

I know of a couple of magazines out here who are in the same boat.

Quark did have a early advantage in AppleScripting early on, but InDesign has blown past it. I wasn't ever convinced on the importance of AppleScript until I saw a script batch up an entire plate with a hundred or so business cards at once.

dan what exactly would u say is the thing quark is good at

I had a few days where I toyed with applescript in InDesign, modifying some of their supplied scripts to create a cropster replacement, changing values and trying to merge two scripts so with one click you could take a box, make guides around it, then draw cropmarks then even make bleed guides as well.

The thing with quark is, and maybe it's just being more used to it, that in it's simplicity it can be a bit more logical. Like I mentioned that "paste into" thing. In Quark the metaphor is simple, you have the frame and you have the content and you can copy the entire object or just the content. InDesign of course works the same way but when you copy the content of an object and want to replace the content of the other object you have to switch to select the frame and then select paste into.

Another thing that drives me nuts, and correct me if I'm wrong, but when you select the content of a frame, it gives you the offset values from the corner of the page, not from the box. So if you have the same art placed in two boxes, but maybe they're different resolutions and you want to match their placement, it gets really confusing.

Maybe the problem has always been that I'm in InDesign trying to do certain things the Quark way, but I also think in a few cases Adobe based choices not on what would be the best method, but on what would be a different way to do it.

In the end, it's just a few nitpicking things, while InDesign destroys Quark a thousand times over in different ways. The Illustrator style transform grid thing on the upper left is crucial crucial crucial. It's hard to go back to quark after using that. And InDesigns pre-press capabilities are amazing...it's preflight feature is pretty basic, though I hear it's more advanced in CS4, but features like the ability to look at ink densities are really cool.

wait it's not doing that offset thing right now, it does it sometimes. I can't remember when that's a problem but know it's been an issue for me.

and you can only snap to visible guides! That's nuts!

I don't want to say exactly where I work as I know I've slagged them off a few times, but it is a pretty well known local paper in the UK. I will say that the rest of the office has moved to PCs with Quark 6.5 - the management thought it would cost too much to retrain the subs onto indesign (not that they ever get any training in the first place, half of them have no idea how to change to width of a border for example, or can tell the diffence between opening a quark document or an eps). However, in our tiny design department we are on the oldest machines running the oldest software with the least RAM - despite having the most computer intensive work to do.

Management did buy us a PC to share between three a year ago and we've slowly got copies of Indesign CS2, Illustrator CS3, Photoshop CS2, Flash MX and Dreamweaver on it from various people's machines as people have been made redundant, woohoo! But… it has 1Gb of RAM and no expansion slots, so goes very slowly on intensive jobs too - whenever I ask if I.T. can upgrade it, they increase the virtual memory, as if that's really going to help.

Yes, I know I should leave there.

Oh, forgot to say we are on the dual-G4 towers running OS 9.2 with Quark 4.11, Photoshop 8 and Illustrator 9. We did have even slower 450mhz G4s until a year ago when every one else was moved to PCs - either managagement really hate us or they are incredibly stupid.

haa thats nuts

Have you guys heard about Classilla? It's an update of Mozilla to use the latest Firefox rendering engine fr OS 9. I remember the shitty browser being the the thin I hated most about working with OS 9.

Car analogy upthread OTM. Quark is fundamentally very simple: you have a page, you put boxes on it, you fill those boxes with stuff, you reboot, you redraw and refill the boxes, you save as EPS, done. There's a tool for moving boxes about, and a tool for moving stuff inside boxes about.

But indesign brings the whole baggage and mindset of the Illustrator/Photoshop setup, and the metaphor's not as neat. You have a page, but the boxes are a bit fluid, and then you get an extra virtual box which is the content and that can slide about inside the other box. There's a black arrow for selecting one kind of box, and a white arrow for making everything break, and it sometimes doesn't feel so much like a page as it does an illustrator layout.

For the very basic fundamentals of getting a straightforward page together, I think Quark gets it, just like a hammer's best for whapping nails. But inDesign is a whole toolbox. W

There's a black arrow for selecting one kind of box, and a white arrow for making everything break

― stet, Wednesday, July 22, 2009 9:38 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lool

oh man, InDesign humor, we've entered the design nerd netherworld

one day I'll tell stories about working at one of NY's largest service bureaus/printshops and getting Microsoft Publisher documents.

But inDesign is a whole toolbox. W

bahahahahahahaha

I did layout for a county weekly for a few years but getting paid 50¢ over minimum wage per hour...I had to move on once I moved out of my parents house.

Have you guys heard about Classilla? It's an update of Mozilla to use the latest Firefox rendering engine fr OS 9. I remember the shitty browser being the the thin I hated most about working with OS 9.

Yeah, been using it since last week. It still doesn’t display a lot of newer web pages at all as the CSS support is very old, but it is better than the previous Mozilla port, Wamcom.

For better rendering, you can use iCab – but the java on it is so slow it brings the whole machine to a halt for 30 seconds on every other website.

This thread got me curious, so I read a review of Quark 8. It says that they've dropped the "make-a-box-and-fill-it" metaphor for a copy of the InDesign thing, and have added single-letter shortcuts. WTG, guys.

That reminds me of the only bit of InDesign that genuinely pisses me off: when you transform a picture box into a text box just by clicking in it.

If I was to attempt to teach myself InDesign what book/resource would you guys recommend?

visual quickstart guide did for me

Adobe "Classroom in a Book" series helped me get a good start w/ InDesign and Illustrator. However cheesy they seem, the skillbuilding "projects" which accompany the various chapters on tools & functions are essential to quickly memorizing the basics.

Do u know quark? Adobe have a good guide to ID for Quark users, which is what I used.

I used Quark some while working for my college newspaper, but ID came out right around the same time I started doing print design &, having a background in Photoshop & Illustrator, I jumped on that bandwagon without thinking twice, so my opinions are certainly biased. And since I was approaching it more from the Illustrator than the Quark angle, it seemed very intuitive from that perspective. I don't know the specific book you're referring to, but I've generally found the Adobe books to be quite helpful.

when I first started using InDesign thinking of it as a bastard child of Quark and Illustrator is how I made sense of it.

One of the best free resources is this page of videos on the Adobe website. I found it when the CS3 interface came out and I needed to figure all that out. Argh, now I can't find it. Maybe they took it down. It was all these Lynda training vids and you could select which application and how advanced and it covered tons of stuff.

I can't tell if these are the same:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WS136D91ED-FAC8-4f4e-82A7-CF406D0131BB.html

ah, I found it!

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/

it's fairly well hidden!

Everything at the Adobe website is fairly well hidden.

what i liked most about ID when we first met, was how much more control i had over the type. keep options and hyphen settings and all sorts of wonderful things i could set for dealing with large chunks of copy. it was a fantastic day when i discovered all that stuff.

The paragraph-level composer is brilliant as well (apparently it's a lift of the TeX engine). No more manually turning line-by-line.

Cheers guys, thanks for all the suggestions.
I have used Quark - briefly in the late 90's but more for archiving the text than creating layout.
I come from more of the Photoshop and Illustrator end of things.
I figured while I have an educational licence for ID it won't hurt to get to know it a bit...

when you transform a picture box into a text box just by clicking in it

HA, if I'd had time at work today between drawing and subbing three different papers, I was going to post exactly that. It is a MAMMOTH fucking pain in the arse and there's only been one time in however many zillions of layouts that I've actually thought: "Here, I could save myself 0.5s here by just clicking on that box to make it a text frame."

The paragraph-level composer is brilliant as well

Umm. It is, yes, but it causes me a lot of grief at the same time. I'm assuming this is simply down to our crappy H&J settings, which I guess were copied across wholesale from QPS ... either way, you'd have a hard time convincing most of your former workmates of its merits.

Especially when, for some templates, it's turned on for pullquotes, standfirsts etc. Which is just insane.

The Illustrator style transform grid thing on the upper left is crucial crucial crucial

Hahah: I think I know what you mean, but it's something I *never* use. That's one of the joys of InDesign, I suppose -- it really can be all things to all dudes -- but yeh, your car metaphor and the flaws it subtly highlights is absolutely right.

not that they ever get any training in the first place, half of them have no idea how to change to width of a border for example, or can tell the diffence between opening a quark document or an eps

I'm not going to condone the lack of training newspapers provide -- but I didn't have so much as a single second's worth of Quark teaching. (Stet: did you? Formally, I mean -- not the obvious staggering wealth of knowledge you'd have picked up from me/Nobson/RW?) I learned on the job very fucking quickly, out of necessity (long story that I'd love to tell, naming names, but let's not go there; also, FWIW, I totally understand your reticence about naming your employer and figured you might say that).

We did get training on InDesign, oddly enough, so I shouldn't complain too hard ... I spent most of it arguing with the trainer, mind :)

Anyway, there was going to be a point there, which is this: subs who refuse to learn even the simplest fucking shit do themselves no favours at all. Stet and I know one ageing chap -- a very talented operator -- who would happily draw up intricate layouts with a pencil on a grid but refused to learn even the rudiments of Quark. Which is heartily fucking stupid: it's not the buttons and the menus that are the difficult bit of the job, it's having the talent to produce a good page.

And it's intrasigent, fuckwitted, backwards-ass, cunt-ridden attitudes like his that have ended up with subkind being seen by so many proprietors as a relic of the bad old days, thus buggering up what I once assumed might be a reasonably rewarding career. (Hmm. Perhaps I should stop ranting now.)

InDesign by miles. Haven't touched Quark in years.

one day I'll tell stories about working at one of NY's largest service bureaus/printshops and getting Microsoft Publisher documents.

Oh, Lord. Now Publisher seems to be free with Office, and everyone else where I work suddenly thinks they're a designer. They come to me to ask for "training" in Publisher, and send me their horrible Publisher flyers asking me to pretty them up a bit.

I got a coreldraw file in 2006. that was weird.

(thanks for the video link, btw dan)

Oh god Publisher - I get all sorts of homebrew crap made with this and everyone is utterly confused that I don't use it and don't know anything about it. "But you're a designer, what on earth do you use if you don't use Publisher?". I get to deal with their misfit twenty fonts and four gradient crapfests.

i used to get ads as publisher files for a small magazine i was laying out - i think i used to open them in publisher then export as a jpg or something - i mean if u send me a publisher file yr getting what u deserve

I'm the sole graphic designer at a company with 14,000 employees. Last spring, our IT dept was kind enough to install Publisher on everyone's computer. They followed up by alerting all 14,000 employees about all the wonderful flyers, poster, etc. they could now create on their own. They kind of skipped the whole "good luck getting that professionally printed" part. These are the same retards that seem to think you can use Microsoft Word to create a brochure. Fuck my life.

Dude.

I used to open up powerpoint documents, save each page as a postscript to output to slide film. Fun times. Other clients would design presentation slides in quark to then output as slides. I guess the slide carousel still dominated the presentation biz those days.

zomg Brøderbund's PrintShop still exists and is now on version 23!

wow...the shit my friends did in elementary school with printshop and that perforated dot matrix paper is legendary. Some incredible birthday banners!

I should start doing all my work with Printshop and Koala Micro Illustrator.

when you transform a picture box into a text box just by clicking in it.

Maybe (but probably not) there is some way to change the basic assumtions that the program makes, because Photoshop does this, too, kind of. If you draw any shape, even with a color fill, then switch to the text tool and click back on the frame, it wants to use the outline of the shape as a text path, and includes them on the same layer, and you have to undo. Training myself to make a new layer first took way too long. I would blame myself, because a poor craftsman blames his tools etc, but then again, a poor software designer blames the user, so that's a wash.

I'm not going to condone the lack of training newspapers provide -- but I didn't have so much as a single second's worth of Quark teaching. (Stet: did you? Formally, I mean -- not the obvious staggering wealth of knowledge you'd have picked up from me/Nobson/RW?) I learned on the job very fucking quickly, out of necessity (long story that I'd love to tell, naming names, but let's not go there; also, FWIW, I totally understand your reticence about naming your employer and figured you might say that).

No formal training whatsoever - I got a temp job in the repro department of a local newspaper about 15 years ag by blagging I had more Photosop experience than I did. I'd spent a lot of time using graphics programs on the Amiga when I was younger so I had good basics understanding, and played around a little with a cracked PS at home.

The work was pretty simple and I was a quick worker - this was before the internet, lol - so I spent a lot of time doing other semi-design work in Photoshop for the rest of prepress ad make-up, such as montages, or logos. I also used Quark and Illustrator a little bit when I was bored: did I mention this was before the internet came along at work?

After a couple of years I got promoted into ad-makeup, and the odd page-layout using Quark - but even at the beginning I seemed to know more about Quark than the old boys there who were from the hot-metal and paste-up days.

I moved onto a different newspaper after a year or two, and after a couple of years blagged a job in the design studio based on my portfolio. Unfortunately that's where I'm still stuck, waiting for a redundancy payout which never arrives. Somehow our studio still struggles along despite 95% of prepress being outsourced to an American company in India, the printing being moved to another newspaper in the organisation, and the slow movement of subbing over there too. Probably becuase they pay us so little in the first place!

Aye, it's a grim fucking world to be working in, eh? I share your pain (and maybe even an overall employer, though I'm not 100% on that). Good luck with the VR: hope you can get something sorted.

Quark's new holiday promotion...buy 1 get 1 free!

That's adorably stupid.

lmfao http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyemagazine/5198450493/sizes/l/in/photostream

i'm trying to learn illustrator and i find myself on forums looking up basic how-to tips and there are always examples of the forum members' illustrations & i saw this avatar

http://forums.devshed.com/image.php?u=131966&dateline=1194386177

and wondered if it was someone remaking rothko in illustrator

i am currently installing quark lmao

I've not touched the fucker in nearly 3 years after my aforementioned employers above, which was The Argus in Brighton, gave my department a mercy killing. If I'm doing layouts now, it's with InDesign thankfully.

i had to open an old document

i thought i had the importer plugin on indesign but

wow...the shit my friends did in elementary school with printshop and that perforated dot matrix paper is legendary. Some incredible birthday banners!

― dan selzer, Thursday, July 23, 2009 11:27 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

classic post

indeed, I was just admiring it
which version of quark did you get??

9.1 !

i think i learned on 4

oh my gosh
I haven't used a version since 6.0, is it still pretty much the same?

I still have Quark on my resume even though none of my jobs have required it for years, it's silly.

http://i.imgur.com/SAwZB.png

I heard 9 was supposed to be a return to form, but lol quark y'knoe?

Actually that does look pretty classic. Glad the measurements palette is a sane size again

i think it's bad luck to take quark off your cv

plus there's a generation of chief subs who think that this adobe fool's paradise will fall apart and we'll all get back to making proper magazines in quark 4.1 any minute now.

lol quark

Affinity Publisher finally available as a public beta.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/

Hoping this pans out so I can finally get out from under the yoke of Adobe subscription prices.

Totes hilar that my resume denotes proficiency in both subjects of the thread title and yet I scanned the thing three times before the words I was reading finally registered in my brain. I suppose I could use a refresher in that whole 'discipline in which I have a college degree' thing, huh.

I just downloaded Publisher. Don't see myself ever leaving Adobe but it's interesting and maybe it'll light a fire under Adobe's bloated ass. Already looks like they're going for a tighter integration of the three programs, which Adobe totally doesn't have.

I don't think I've even touched any Adobe products (besides Acrobat, obvs) since they switched to that weird subscription model a number of years back. In part because of misplaced bitterness over my completely wasted intensive study of ActionScript (RIP Flash).

ha. I don't have a choice. It's my entire career.

but for the record, I have no problem with the subscription model. I find it's a good deal and it's easer than shelling out the big money for the full product and updates. My issue is with the bloat of features and inconsistency between products.

Ooh

I played with this for half an hour today. It’s really pretty nice! Keyboard shortcuts need some work, and there is odd defaulting, but I can do everything I could in QXP4.

If it doesn't crash and cause corrupt unsalvageable layouts then it'll already have a step up on QXP4

It's the year 2020 and I'm *still* entertained by Quark hatred
https://tidbits.com/2020/07/22/unless-you-are-a-masochist-do-not-buy-quarkxpress/

I tried it a few months ago out of nostalgia if nothing else and that article doesn't get close to how atrocious it is. How can it still be so staggeringly bad? It makes 4.11 look like a NASA-grade rock of reliability.

I love the timelessness of the “oh shit they still make quark?” posts from 11 years ago.

I’ve still never used it because it wouldn’t work on the networked system 7 macs in the college computer lab circa 1995 so we used PageMaker instead.

one of these days I'll have an idea I actually want to follow through on and pony up for Affinity Publisher