Quarkxpress Versus Adobe's Gang Of Four

QuarkXPress has been the number one page layout software package since the early 1990s, an automatic choice for graphic artists and publishing professionals. However, it has started to play second fiddle to its biggest rival, Adobe InDesign which along with the rest of Adobe's Creative Suite version 3 is rapidly becoming the automatic choice that QuarkXPress once was.

The huge advantage that Adobe has in this battle of the DTP giants is that most users and potential users of QuarkXPress will also be users of one or more members of the Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. Every time the question of upgrades comes around, there will always be the option, for such users, of upgrading one of their Adobe products to the Adobe Creative Suite rather than just upgrading to the latest version of QuarkXPress.

A fair amount of complacency with their apparently unassailable position as the best page layout program out led Quark to make several key strategic errors such as the release in 2002 of QuarkXPress version 5 for Mac OS 9 (an obsolete version of the Mac operating system) shortly after Adobe had released InDesign 2 which ran on the latest Mac OS X operating system.

Users of page layout programs look like being the main beneficiaries of the rivalry between InDesign and QuarkXPress. The release of upgrades to QuarkXPress has greatly accelerated in the last few years, with version 8 not far away and each release now bringing genuinely improved functionality.

In response to Adobe's claims of tight integration between InDesign and other Creative Suite programs, Quark seem to be taking the "If you can't beat them, join them" attitude. QuarkXPress now allows the importing of files saved in Photoshop's native .PSD file extension and has a nifty PSD Import palette which allows sophisticated manipulation of elements within the file. Because these changes are shown in the context of the final layout, there may even be an argument for making these changes in QuarkXPress rather than Photoshop.

So, what does the future hold for QuarXPress? Well, whilst it now appears that most design professionals see InDesign as the future of page layout, it's important to remember that not all users of QuarkXPress are designers. A lot of corporations now buy QuarkXPress for producing in-house publications. So, in the future, we may see different flavours of the program emerging aimed at different types of user.

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The author of this article has been teaching training courses on QuarkXPress for many years. He is a training consultant with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent IT training company based in London.

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