I, for one, would be very interested in hearing the results.
The big issue is weather or not I will find it accurately and speedily accomplishes what I will need it to do. Another issue is how it will handle working on stuff created in InDesign, and how effectively something I hand off to an InDesign user can be managed. And I’ve found that responses from developers aren’t always very accurate.
Not only were the plugins expensive and often buggy, when you paid for a Quark upgrade (which weren’t cheap) you usually got stuck paying for upgrades for all the plugins as well. It’s another reason why InDesign made a lot of sense for workgroups and individuals.
Depending on your needs, it might be worth looking into Scribus [https://www.scribus.net/]. It is a multi-platform, open source, page layout program that seems to have all of the basic features of one. You most certainly cannot argue about the price as it is free, but supported by donations. It seems to be in the category of LibreOffice and Project Libre but for page layout. I have not actually used it in detail but from what I have seen of if it might be a great alternative. It also comes with excellent documentation.
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I did my first layouts and books in Quark back in the late Eighties. it was such an exciting piece of software, just to have that power. In the Nineties it was the app for designers, photoshop and illustrator feeding into it. I knew it inside out, I loved training designers with it, bringing them up to speed. It was the first app I knew which did basic math in inspectors, once designers saw a page height being divided by a number to set a box height or a box width being used to set step and repeat their eyes would light up…
But it was always a pain on registration, default position was you were a thief. I withstood the Adobe juggernaut as long as I could but studios needed what it brought.
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I’m also a long time XPress user, starting at version 2, then 3, and so on. But, I was also a beta tester on Adobe K2, which became in time, InDesign.
What I liked, and still like, about XPress, is that it was understandable to someone who was taught blue lines and waxing. Moving from a physical to a digital workflow made sense with XPress. And I appreciated the small, smooth, and intuitive GUI.
However, even though I had reviewer status, and thus complimentary licenses, I remember the cover of MacWeek with the headline “Quark Promises Better Customer Support” or something to that effect, and stories just like that, ever couple of years. The arrogance of the company was astounding. I remember a period where you were billed for reporting bugs. Seriously. I was even on the QuarkImmedia team as a high-level consultant user, or whatever title they gave us. A group of us met in NY for a conference, and “we” were put up in nice rooms at the Hyatt (hanging gardens) while the employees were put up in a dump nearby. Which gives you an idea of how the company valued its staff. I should add that QuarkImmedia was a brilliant product, ahead of its time, but it died on the vine.
So, when the university I taught at moved to OS X, it meant that our installed base of XPress needed to be compliant. So, I called my colleagues at Quark, and pleaded with them to send someone to the university to demonstrate the upcoming OS X version, and they refused to do so. Keep in mind that we were one of the initial universities to feature XPress in our design curriculum, starting with the initial release, so we had a long record with the company. In the end, we never received any demo, or access to a beta version of the OS X version. To make things worse, XPress utilized its own home-brew license server, compared to Adobe which allowed us to use Sassafras to serve up licenses. So, an additional headache for our IT staff. And since we already used Photoshop, Illustrator, and other apps, getting InDesign for free, as it was bundled in, was a no-brainer.
So, in one fell swoop, the school went from being one Quark’s original higher-ed pioneers, to adopting InDesign and never looking back. On a personal level, I’ve maintained a license, have reviewed recent versions, and worked with a great press representative, but things seem to have changed of late. This reminds me of RSG (Ready, Set, Go), which was another fast, easy to use, and capable page layout program, who, through a variety of new owners, seems to have become a ghost. There’s something about new owners who are financial people, destroying the companies they purchase.
Oh well, as they say, software isn’t like wine. It doesn’t get better with age.
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OMG, I forgot all about this horrific disaster! Immedia’s intentions were good, but the implementation was horrific. Quark could have released what would have prevented Dreamweaver from becoming a success, but they released a totally unworkable product. They didn’t try to understand, or totally disregarded, the differences between web and print development, design and production, and the requirements of publishers, audiences and advertisers.
The idea was that Immedia would enable a printed magazine or newspaper to be magically morphed into web pages. But it was released in the days of dial up modems, a limited palette of 256 colors, so nothing worked, looked or downloaded effectively. End users could only access the sites in a viewer app, not in a web browser, and the viewer was prone to frequent crashes, and the viewing public didn’t want to sit in front of a screen forever, waiting for pages that looked like big messes because print design is inherently different than web. And the pages weren’t very interactive. Even worse, audio and video links usually didn’t work. And IIRC, the pages were just big image files, not HTML or even PDFs, so search engines couldn’t access them. And advertisers didn’t want their ads in them, even if they were thrown in for free with a paid print schedule.
At the time, there already were apps and Xtensions that would convert Quark pages into interactive HTML that was viewable in a web browser. And PDF viewers were already established in the market, and PDFs downloaded faster than Immedia documents, and rendered type, images and links beautifully. I just don’t understand why what were very smart and savvy developers and printing industry mavins who knew so much about publishing requirements and workflows failed to consider that web design and development would be very different than print. At least Flash managed a brief time in the sun before Steve Jobs and iPhone dropped an atom bomb on it.
Indesign is the Microsoft Word of page layout: it does the job, but quite inelegantly. Quark is a typographer’s program: the user is in control. I’ve set many books, including very large and graphics-heavy ones and never encountered problems like those described in the article. I work almost exclusively in Indesign now and curse it almost every day. It takes 2 or 3 usually mysterious extra steps to do anything, and yes it crashes. Quark hasn’t crashed on me since the big re-do of version 8. For technical support at all levels, the Facebook group is very helpful.
This is something I’d like to see too. Back in the days of Adobe’s Creative Suite, they had a couple of different bundles, two aimed at print & photo work, two aimed at web design and animation, and the Master Collection which had everything plus the kitchen sink. 
Considering how many options they have now for Creative Cloud, adding a few intermediate tiers surely wouldn’t require much effort on their part, no?
As it it, I already have Affinity Designer and Photo, and recently replaced InDesign with Affinity Publisher.
I don’t have any recent experience with QuarkXPress, my last time opening that was back in the OS 9.2 days, but I recall that I found it deeply intimidating.
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This really chimes with my experience of InDesign, as someone who has also used multiple incarnations of Word on both Mac and Windows. The Character and Paragraph settings panels in particular are so packed with options that it sometimes takes me some hunting to find where the setting I’m after is located.
I’m not sure how deep I will get into it but it does import IDML file, which is a format used by InDesign if you need to open the ID layout in an older version of ID. I tried importing only one layout this way, but it seemed to work.
The app in its 2019 and 2018 versions were both horrors. Even worse than their performance was the support! Affinity is a far, far better choice for the Mac user.
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Thank you!
Ready, Set, Go! - I couldn’t remember the page layout software I used before PageMaker.
RSG! was a great little program, developed/marketed originally by Letraset I seem to remember, but as you say, it was allowed to wither on the vine.
So my DTP life has been RSG! > PageMaker > QXP > InDesign > InDesign and QXP > InDesign, and now I’ve retired I find that Pages does most of the stuff I want do quite capably. And I’m old/fortunate enough to have learn hot metal page makeup on a Linotype at college.
The first book I worked on the designer rang the typesetter, told the guy I was going to fax him over the copy (for which I had to fill out a form and queue) and to set it in “Garamond. Three inches wide, 11 over 15, not too loose, you know the way I like it.”
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Ready, Set, Go! was independently published and then purchased by Letraset. It was nice but I never fell in love with it like others have.
My path was similar. RSG!->PageMaker->QXP->ID. Though I am in IT so I do more support work in these apps than any design work in them.
No RSG for me. First stop - Pagemaker, then Quark, then InDesign. This thread makes me want to queue up Talking Heads, B52s, David Bowie, Roxette, Fine Young Cannibals, etc. on Music.
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I’m another dinosaur. I used PageMaker starting in 1985. Then went to XPress, tried InDesign, used FrameMaker, and recently have made minor attempts to use things like SwiftPublisher.
FrameMaker was great – I did my first book in it – but it’s long dead on the Mac (my recent books are being done in NisusWriter, since they don’t need as much formatting, and it is awesome for text handling). PageMaker was easy to use but just too sloppy; it was too easy to get things out of alignment.
InDesign was and is the best, but you can’t be a part-time InDesign user; it’s too expensive! And if you stop subscribing, remember what those big tall guys with the unshaven faces said: “Nice little file; too bad you’ll never see its contents again.”
The lesser applications: SwiftPublisher is just not powerful enough; I can do all that it does in NisusWriter, and have regular expressions and macros to boot! AffinityPublisher – I know people swear by the Affinity apps, but got so frustrated by AffinityPhoto that I gave up and shifted to Acorn. And Publisher seems to have been designed by the same people…
So I’m still using XPress. I don’t buy every over-priced upgrade, but I still use it. The user interface needs a lot of work, but it’s probably still second only to InDesign in terms of power… and you can buy it and have done. You just have to learn to think in terms of text boxes more than pages. I don’t find it that hard. (You should have seen version 1.0. 
)Which is more expensive in the long run, a one-time project to learn XPress – or the rest of your life spent paying Adobe for InDesign?
Of course, that should be taken with a grain of salt. I seem to have a deep fondness for programs that are very powerful but fairly obscure and die of something-or-other, from FrameMaker to 4th Dimension to FileMaker Developer to (come to think of it) writing programs in Pascal, or at least C, rather than Objective-C.
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You all have me looking at my vintage desktop publishing magazines that just happen to be in my bedroom.
Personal Publishing magazine from Feb 1986. Publish! Sept/Oct 1986, Desktop Publishshing Dec 1985. These were all cross platform, even saw ads for CP/M systems. There was another publication I had from the day but I guess I didn’t keep it. It was a PC only publishing magazine that disdained Macs. It considered itself the publishing magazine for people who used real computers and couldn’t afford a Mac, no matter how much money it would make for them.
Magazine content varied. Some were more into hardware and software. The better ones realized that many readers were publishing neophytes so they include basics of page layout and non-layout issues such as copyright.
Ads and articles for PageMaker,MicroTEX, MacPublisher (one I never owned), ReadSetGo, Microsoft Word, Spellbinder Desktop Publisher, Frontpage, MacTEX, and WordPerfect.
Desktop Publisher
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What a nightmare. When I’ve wanted to put together longer text documents (we don’t do book length), the easiest way to build them is in one of the better word processors like Apple’s Pages or SwiftPublisher. For academic type work, many swear by Mellel but the typography is apparently not good enough for commercial work (although the latest version will do ePub format automatically).
I’m with everyone else: there’s no way I’m building any dependencies on Adobe subscription software into our workflow. I don’t even want to waste my time and that of my team learning any Adobe software as it’s basically an investment lost in advance. We are selling off all our perpetual CS6 licenses (we iwb about three or four Design and Production Suites).
I was just speaking to a friend I worked with at the time who reminded me that when InDesign was first released Quark was so entrenched with users that InDesign wasn’t selling. Companies and individuals had invested big bucks in Xpress and extensions, and the big % of users had already conquered the learning curve. So Adobe began giving InDesign away for free with a purchase or upgrade of the newly announced Creative Suite of Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. This made a lot of sense as individuals and companies needed to at least upgrade these “absolutely must have” applications.