Will QuarkXpress Survive The Adobe Onslaught

by Andrew Whiteman

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.

Adobe’s gang of four products are InDesign, a direct competitor to QuarkXPress often dubbed the Quark-killer, Photoshop, the widely-used image-manipulation software, Illustrator the vector graphics package and Acrobat which is used for creating and optimising PDF files. One huge advantage that Adobe now have over QuarkXPress is the way in which these programs interact with each other.

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.

The fierce rivalry between InDesign and QuarkXPress will probably be good news for users of page layout software. We can expect the rapid addition of cool new features in each new release of the two programs and, hopefully, equally speedy releases of bug fixes.

Several of the new features in QuarkXPress 7 indicate that Quark are now fully awake to the threat posed by InDesign and are responding to it. QuarkXPress 7 allows the import of native Photoshop files (.psd) and has a special PSD Import palette containing options for manipulating imported Photoshop documents. Users can change the opacity and blend modes of the original Photoshop layers and work with alpha and spot colour channels.

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.

About the Author:

The author of this article has been running 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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