Open thoughts on the progress of Quark and InDesign

potter__

potter__

Graphic Designer
I want to see where people are and what they think of Quark and InDesign.

Horror stories, cool stories, tips, hints. EVERYTHING!
If you want to bash one of them, go ahead but please no rambling for posts and posts about the same subject.

Thoughts can be anything from, usage of an app to where you think the company wants to go next <cough> quark with web design instead of print <cough>

It's all open, have fun
 
QuarkXPress

Horror stories

Has anyone tested the v6 beta ? It still has screen redraw problems ! Quark stays Quark, still the same ;)

Cool stories

New Markzware freebies for Quark 4/5 ! Check' em out at www.markzware.com.

Tips

Recently discovered that option+command+zero fits the whole spread on screen. Gee ! I like that shortcut.

Hints

You know the 'alien' easter egg in Quark ? Do it five times and see what happens... :)

InDesign

I hate PostScript level 3, period.
 
I recently used Quark for the first time in a while on a job and I found it really strange. Its fast of course but going back to it from InDesign was weird, especially as I've been using the osx version more recently.

I got InDesign when it came out but still used Quark at the time. I've done less and less DTP stuff over the past couple of years although I've been putting an album sleeve together and its all in ID. Having to do work work in Quark again was a bit horrible at first (where's all the anti-aliasing, why can't I PDF without having to distill the damn thing!!!) but I did get back into it quite quickly. Things seem to take less time in Quark but ID is so nice to use. Or course this is before I upgraded my G4 and the Quark version I was on was quite old.

Sorry, I'm sure rambling was mentioned, I better stop.

Is the Quark beta public?
 
Of course the beta is private and has therefore leaked. But anyway, this beta is 100% crap, nobody but ignorant people wants it ! It's slow, buggy, and adds nothing really new to Quark, in terms of GUI and maniability.

Stick with Quark 4, people !
 
Just o let yo in on a secre, I have used a copy of he Quark 6. It is crap. Tanks for the ignorance comment. The amount of stuff that they haven't fixed, the speed of the program and the fact that the prgram is 6 months delayed and you can't even push Command-Shift-S without crashing the program completly, plus that command is now "add shadow to text"!!! They have changed nothing from 5 except from the lack of working. You can only downsave to five which means you have to get that in order to print at a print house which only has 3 or 4, and when you do downsave, you are saving as a document and not what is calls a 'project' so if you want to keep working in the downsaved document you have to name is every time and select 'replace'. Yes I know it's a beta but it is also as I have stated, a six month delay beta and the only thing that they got right was the damb Command-Shift-Option-Control-Delete alien! Quark is going down if they don't smarted their act up and do something presentable within the next 6 months or I think were are going to see another conversion like the Pagemaker to Quark era.
 
But what is going to happen when they buy a new mac and it doesn't boot in OS 9? They will either have to switch to Quark 6 or InDesign, and by then, they will have to rush to get to know the other app. It happened to me, Quark 4 wouldn't work one night and I had to have something done in a couple of days, I had the ID installation files and tried it, got the work done with several hours to spare and ended up doing a better jod then I ould have with quark. The overall speed is faster then quark, but simple things like file opening and placing images is longer only because it actually uses .PSD's and .AI's for file placment as well as the standard eps' and tiff's, now you don't have to save twice and take up that much more room on you drives just for one project.
 
Those new Macs I don't support anyway. OS9 is ten years of stability and speed, I want it, whatever Steve thinks.

Okay for speed increase because you don't work out with TIFFs and EPS, but first of all, working with AI files can be problematic (cross-platform, cross-version problems) and second, the PDFs you create with that won't get thru any RIP, you need some Level 3 drivers.

My printhouse uses Level 2 only, sic.
 
I recently put together a school newspaper (an activity in an American school in Cairo). Since moving to X I have been very reluctant to boot classic and so I got a copy of ID (from a friend;) ) and tried it out.

Admittedly my rig (a clamshell) was never made for production, but ID was a pig. Aside from the problems of figuring out how to set runaround and find the way to make a drop-cap, the screen redraw was terrible, typing in edits on screen was dreadful, and the whole process of placing text and pics was annoying to be kind.

I tossed ID and we went back to system 9 to work with Quark.

i don't use it to bake the daily bread, so I am able to say wait. We will stick with quark 4 for the school newspaper.

I do hope that quark gets its X act together.
 
When You are exporting to pdf format, there is a dropdown menu which allows you to choose level 1, 2, and 3. I am using a Lexmark Optra C, one on the oldest if not the first colour lazer printer designed for offices. I have thrown PDF's left and right at it and it handles it quite nicely (other then the pdf colour problem) but when I try to give it a quark file of distilled pdf I always get it forgetting the file and not dooing a thing after it spools.
 
The more I use InDesign, the better I feel about it. Quark doesn't exist on my comp at all now, and I had been using it for around six years. As for the feeble update offerrings at an extremely over-inflated price: I don't feel like getting ripped off by Quark anymore.
 
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