Written by QuarkXPress, for so long the dominant force in the page layout arena, now finds itself fighting for survival and under attack by four products all created by Adobe, who look like achieving the same kind of dominance in the creative market that Microsoft have achieved in the general computing market.
To some degree, Quark only have themselves to blame. Throughout the nineties, they demonstrated a fair amount of complacency with their market position. QuarkXPress was released in 1987 and had only one competitor: Aldus (later Adobe) PageMaker. Mainly because of the greater degree of typographical control and accuracy it offered users, QuarkXPress emerged victorious from this early battle. PageMaker faded into the background, becoming regarded as the program of choice for non-specialists while graphic designers all adopted QuarkXPress. It was only with the advent of InDesign and the more recent release of the Adobe Creative Suite that Adobe was able to offer Quark a serious challenge.
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.
Quark’s rather complacent attitude in the late nineties and early noughties contributed significantly to the shift from QuarkXPress to InDesign. For numerous years QuarkXPress dominated the market. It was the automatic choice for anyone creating publications which were to be professionally printed and there was more than a touch of complacency in their attitude. Upgrades were slow in coming and the product cost the earth.
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.
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, does QuarkXPress have much of a future? Most designers have now chosen InDesign as their preferred page layout software.
However, it is not just designers and publishing professionals who will determine Quark’s future. There are many users in the corporate and education sectors and, as with the web arena, there are an increasing number of non-specialist users of QuarkXPress who may be targeted in the future with the release of an intro-level version of the software.
The author is a trainer and developer with TrainingCompany.Com, an independent computer training company offering QuarkXPress training courses in London and throughout the UK.
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