QuarkXPress or InDesign?

QuarkXPress or InDesign

  • QuarkXPress

  • InDesign

  • Other (please specify)

  • Microsoft Publisher :D

Results are only viewable after voting.
CaptainQuark

CaptainQuark

93 93/93
A certain person, who shall remain nameless (*cough*Natobasso*cough*) and ol' CQ have been battling for a while now over which is the better package – QuarkXPress or InDesign. Neither of us will budge. :D

So what do other MacOSX users think?
 
Hi CQ,

I gotta go with InDesign. Quark had great days, but now I think a lot of the people who prefer it do so largely as they are familiar with it from past versions. I had to get into layout rapidly recently and tried both, and ID blew QXP out of the water for ease of use. Also, QXP is awesomely incompatible with anything else, which is deeply irritating.

The other big factor for me is that ID is part of CS/CS2. While there is a QXP/ID divide, Illustrator and Photoshop are far more dominant in their markets, and the really seamless integration in the CS and CS2 packages saves a lot of stress for InDesign users.
 
I'm certainly not exactly an expert in these matters, but I use DTP software from time to time in my line of work. I tried a number of DTP program demos a few years ago and eventually settled on PageMaker for my needs. Later, when it came time to upgrade, as PageMaker 6.5 was very buggy for me under Classic, I opted for InDesign 2. My needs were not too demanding and InDesign had the integration with other Adobe apps and was easy enough to learn to use.

Again, design is not really my area, so I'm not an expert when it comes to DTP!
 
I remember saying this in a past thread, but basically what I see is QXP incompatibility issues, old and unintuitive interface, and print problems. I vote InDesign for it's intuitive design, good look, and easy input and output of graphics and layouts.
 
CaptainQuark said:
A certain person, who shall remain nameless (*cough*Natobasso*cough*) and ol' CQ have been battling for a while now over which is the better package – QuarkXPress or InDesign. Neither of us will budge. :D

So what do other MacOSX users think?
Click to expand...

Hee hee. It's a battle royale! Hey, I heard Quark named a new president and CEO: http://www.macnews.com/2006/11/01/quark-ceo/. Sweet! Not sure it's going to do any good, though. ;)

I do think it's necessary to keep both programs because we don't want InDesign to get complacent, now do we?
 
InDesign has been my choice since version 1.5 came out. It does what I want reliably and is less of a hassle to use IMO.
 
No matter how you slice it--and I can't stand Quark the company--QuarkXPress still seems to b the standard. I've had one client require I use InDy to do layout on a book so far, tho' I think my second is coming shortly.

The other thing is--right out of the box, now--InDesign's suppposed wonderful handling of type ... wasn't. The word spacing it assigns by default--in both paragraph and line-by-line settings--is more likely to result in word spaces that look like you could drive a truck thru it than with Quark's defaults.

Obviously, tou can fix this on the fly with tracking adjustments, or by changing the appropriate settings, but--as someone who works fairly regularly doing book design and page layout--it says something that a product it is relatively easier to use right out of the box.
 
I never thought I'd say this, because I've always disliked elements of Quark (such as, my pet hate, command-k to delete... rather than the delete key), but now I think it comes down to the type of designer you are. Different tools suit different people.

I've been using both for more time than I care to think about, and have favoured ID ever since I started using it with v1.5. For me there is no competition, but I'm very used to Photoshop and Illustrator, and design with layers, etc. The thing I love about ID is the fluidity of the design process.

Apart from the obvious (already knowing Quark inside out), other people that I have worked with are much more traditional in their approach, and simply aren't interested in what they see as ID's unneccessary "bells & whistles". I have worked with very good designers who ONLY use Quark (as in no other applications at all!).

I do quite a lot of freelance in and around London in very well established agencies, and have found that Quark is seen as a trusted work horse, whereas ID is still to earn its stripes. Many designers (and more importantly, art directors) appear to have tried ID in its early days, but were put off because it was too feature packed (slow) for the hardware it was being run on.

Ironically, the only strength that Quark has over ID, a strength that ID will never be able to compete with, is that Quark is less sophisticated. It's a difficult fight for Quark to win; stop developing the product in the hope of retaining a percentage of designers, or try to take on the might of the Adobe integrated toolset.

I know who my money's on... I don't think either program is perfect, but I think ID's imperfections will be addressed much more quickly.
 
For the stuff that I do, I use Stone Design's Create. It effectively replaced both QuarkXPress (and PageMaker) and Illustrator on many of my systems.

Another reason I use it a lot is the fact that I have versions for OPENSTEP, Rhapsody and Mac OS X.
 
RacerX said:
For the stuff that I do, I use Stone Design's Create. It effectively replaced both QuarkXPress (and PageMaker) and Illustrator on many of my systems.
Click to expand...

I haven't tried it again of late but when I did seriously try to do a project with it I found Create bizarrely awkward to use and buggy. It also seems to be designed by a non-designer with a terribly unattractive GUI.

I'd like to nominate Pages as a new but promising candidate for quality DTP. It has some missing features and a different way of working but has some features that also blow me away.

Even though I am a long standing expert Quark user who loved its directness, solidity and speed I have to concede it has had its day and doesn't play nice since they upgraded it to work with OSX.

I think InDesign is the queen of DTP now, despite flaws in some functions and I am still critical of many details in the way it works. I saw a demonstration of InDesign's object styling the other day and can't wait to try it out.
 
A favorite moment of mine was having my old boss lecture me that a line drawing I did in Illustrator would have taken her "a few seconds" in Quark, then toward the end of the day to see her face glaze over as she realized she had to manually reposition a bunch of crop marks she had done (iitty bitty individual lines) in another Quark file.

I love to batch things to save time, but Quark always forced me to do a lot of things manually, needlessly. I still wake up in a cold sweat recalling all the PDF export glitches.

I'll refrain from voting since I have a lot more experience with Quark than ID, but I hope the latter is a lot better.
 
ID is a whole lot better. The PDFs I export from ID now are 1/5 the size of the Quark pdfs. And ID has auto crop marks if your doc is set to trim size. No more little lines... ;)
 
Wow! Publisher.

IT DOESN'T DO TRANSPARENCY!!!!!!!

And I hate it. So much. I'd honestly rather take a bullet to my head than have it in my workflow again.
 
When I started using DTP apps in 1993 or 1994, I was looking at PageMaker, and I thought: This is somehow wrong. So I looked at XPress, and it was worse. Basically all my initial wishes, however, were later filled with InDesign.
 
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