I still haven’t been able to completely break the habit of saving often manually. So, is the greatest unsung genius of all tech-dom the engineer who sympathized with a user’s pain over lost content, and invented timed auto-save? This is on par with automatic interval windshield wipers and call-waiting, IMO.
1 Like
I’m coming at this from a different angle, having started out as a little paste up gal in an after school and summer job. When Macs and then Pagemaker were introduced they really did change the world in their own ways. Then along came Quark which allowed for edits in graphics by just clicking on some art and it would automatically open or close in Photoshop or Illustrator. And because it was so extensible and handled typography and pagination so beautifully, it enabled workflows to be customized. This was like a miracle for people working on tight, often inflexible deadlines on periodicals, advertising, signage, packaging, etc. It also minimized people constantly running back and forth within offices with floppy disks and Zip drives and the confusion, and sometimes absolute desperation, this usually caused. (And to give credit where credit is due, Apple Talk made this miracle possible). For magazines, newspapers, catalogues and everything else that needed to be paginated, or packaging that required folding, it was manna from heaven. And it was highly extensible.
The problem was that Quark got totally complacent and too expensive. InDesign did what Quark did but did it much better. They added, and kept adding, new features. They eliminated the need for expensive Xtensions as well as super expensive packaging and large format add ons. And Adobe began bundling it with Illustrator, Photoshop and Dreamweaver, making it even more cost effective and enabling better and more efficient workflows.
The magazine company I worked for at the time Pagemaker was introduced had its own prepress Varityper for typesetting. It cost hundreds of thousands of $ + salaries, but it saved a lot of money by setting type in house. It was located on a separate floor under lock and key so the edit, art and production people couldn’t harangue the Varitypists. Quark made it, and them, obsolete. Anyone interested can check out the humongous typesetting machines here:
As much as I moan and groan about Aldus Pagemaker and Quark Xpress, I think it’s important to give credit where credit is due, and also to acknowledge innovation vs. complacency.
1 Like
I use LaTeX frequently. Scientific journals tend to have their own LaTeX macros, which make it easy to both prepare a paper for submission (double spaced, line numbers, figures and tables at the end, etc.) and to get a preview of what it’s going to look like when published just by flipping a switch. I’ve had to use Word in the past, and it’s just an awful experience, since the “equation editors” are horrible. (The last time I had to contribute something to a Word doc I had to write the equation in LaTeX, compile it, and take a screen capture of the equation I needed to make a JPEG of it.) Way, way better than WYSIWYG editors, and TeX, being a text format and open source, won’t become obsolete.
1 Like
This thread reminds me of the forest people in “Fahrenheit 451,” who internalized important books and recited them from memory. I’d almost bet that someone on this list goes back far enough to own an original brush that painted on the walls of Altamira.
Yes, it’s great to be an information seeker and communicator. Loving and helping to evolve the essential tools, by constructively pointing out their weaknesses, just makes it fun.
2 Likes
The Pragmatic Programming publishers do it all in LaTeX and they even error check the source code samples with a linter or compiler to ensure they are correct. Entirety of everything is kept in git revision control. This allows for fast errata fixes and everything is PDF. They can send the book to be printed dead tree style but programming changes so fast by the time a paper book is printed and shipped whole chapters need to be rewritten.
LaTeX is so much more than a mathematical typesetting system. It can do it all and automation can use whatever programming language you wish. LaTeX is all text all the time until you render. You still need graphics and art. But it’s got typesetting more than handled.
1 Like
The OP is absolutely correct. You would have to be a masochist to try to use QuarkXPress to do anything resembling real work.
Having just spent a year working on a large (400+ pages, 2000+ images) book project, my experience exactly duplicates that of the OP. I started my project using QuarkXPress 2019 and am currently using QuarkXPress 2020. I’ve been through multiple point releases, sent multiple support tickets, provided multiple crash dumps to the company for analysis. My project is not done, but at this point, with multiple crashes a day, I have to give up attempting to use this useless product and convert my project to other software.
The OP mentioned just some of the many bugs in QuarkXPress that prevented him from being able to work. I’ll list a few more. But first let me give you just a basic comparative overview about general bugginess. I have completed book projects in the recent past using the free open source Scribus software. The bug level of Scribus is typical of free open source software, that is, it is way buggier than one would expect of commercial software. That said, its functional limitations notwithstanding, it is still usable software. QuarkXPress by comparision is way buggier than Scribus, and in fact it is hands down the most buggy software I have ever spent money on. And as stated, it is even more buggy than a lot of free open source software.
Here are some of the bugs in QuarkXPress that thwarted my attempts to use it. Like the OP, I ran into more bugs than I can even remember, so I’ll limit my list here to just those that made the effects of the constant crashes even worse. Big software tends to have a couple of features that are useful if your system goes down due to a power failure or something. One of them is called auto save. You can configure the software to automatically save the file you are working on every, say, five minutes. That way, if your system goes down, you never lose more than five minutes work of work. QuarkXPress has this feature. It doesn’t work. Another work saving feature is called auto backup. Here, each time you save a file, a backup of the original gets saved too, so if you need to you can revert to the backup. QuarkXPress has this feature, and it too doesn’t work. These are just two bugs. As mentioned, the list goes on. And on.
Now there are bugs and there are BUGS. I was a software engineer for many years, so let me tell you about bugs from the perspective of a software company. Any reasonable software company would rather the bugs in the product be found by the company itself, and every healthy software company has a whole department who’s job is to test the software and report the bugs for fixing. Software bugs are assigned a severity. Low severity bugs may be just minor annoyances, and these tend to get fixed when it is convenient to do so. But high severity bugs get priority because they impact the utility of the product severely. In any software company, the highest severity bugs are those where the product just crashes. Healthy software companies deal with these critical bugs immediately for obvious reasons. They impact the utility of the software yes, but just as important, every time the product crashes the user loses some work. Nobody likes to lose work. Let a few of these bugs stand for even a few days and you can expect a lot of very unhappy customers. Let them stand much longer and you can expect many of these unhappy customers to turn into unhappy ex customers.
Consider the above, and now consider that in my use QuarkXPress has been riddled with the highest priority bugs, actual crashes, that have not been fixed for a FULL YEAR. This is apparently the same experience the OP had with QuarkXPress. It should make you wonder just what is going on inside a company that would allow product crashes to go unfixed for that amount of time. I have no visibility into the internal working of the Quark Inc. of course, but given the catastrophic effects of leaving bugs that cause crashes unfixed, the most likely reason a company would not fix such bugs is because they CAN’T fix them. And the most likely reasons that a company couldn’t fix bugs in their product are that they don’t have the technical expertise to do so, or that the code base (the actual program) is so old and unstructured that even talented engineers have a difficult time figuring it out.
The OP has advised that unless you are a masochist, do not buy QuarkXPress. So I’ll add to the OP’s advice and suggest that the buggy state of this software that frustrated him so is not likely to change for the better. I have given this product and Quark Inc. more than a fair trial period. My assessment is the software is too buggy for use and is likely to remain that way. As I stated above, healthy software companies fix critical bugs, quickly.
4 Likes
I would invite those with limited budgets and not requiring extremely advanced features to take a look at Scribus. It is Open Source and you can’t complain about the price as it is free, supported by donations, and is cross platform.
Also, LibreOffice with its decent inventory of page layout capability and with its other options such as drawing, a database, presentation, spreadsheet, and math, can often be a viable substitute for a page layout program aside from the fact that it is a very competitive substitute for Microsoft Office as it can read and write Microsoft formats. It is also cross platform and free, supported by donations, and given its pricing model, does not continually have its hand in your pockets in order to access your own data like Microsoft 365 now does.
This reminds me of a friend who teaches QuarkXPress classes at a college in the mid-west. Can’t get them to switch to teaching InDesign because the only place that offers a design internship in the area is a local paper that still uses QuarkXPress.
Our problem was the opposite over 10 years ago. We were still on QXP and we couldn’t get any design interns because schools in my area only taught InDesign.
“Taught” might be too strong a word. I find most designers who attended art school are technically illiterate. They can do artisanal hand crafted design but are ignorant of any of the productivity features of InDesign, such as Styles and Master Pages and Find & Replace.
I am with you 100% on this discussion!!! When Quark, the original Quark sold itself to these new owners who promised a better app, better service, easier communication and more responsiveness to the user… they were less than forthcoming. Quark has been a nightmare for at least 5 years now. It is bloated, horribly complicated and resource intensive. Oh yes, it is very expensive especially for the small user to buy and maintain.
Take a look at Affinity Publisher as a viable alternative… it is quite good and constantly getting better. You buy it, you own it (very inexpensive😍). No yearly support subscription. So far updates not matter how many have been free, unlike Quark, which will only allows 4 within a particular version and that only if you pay the support fee. The Affinity Support people are very good and responsive. And, let us not forget you can integrate Affinity Publisher with Affinity Design and Affinity Photo as virtually a single app!
They offer a free fully functional trial for all of these apps too.
1 Like
@turnertomes Wow! Affinity Publisher and its other programs are amazing! The cost is incredible. Thanks for pointing that out to us!
You are most welcome! Their packages are amazing! These people are absolutely worthy of Mac user support.
BTW I’ve just put up a website containing step by step instructions for converting a project from QuarkXPress to Affinity Publisher. It also details more of my woes with both QuarkXPress and the company that sells it, Quark Inc. It can be found here:
2 Likes
OMG What a fantastic work you have done here! I pray that others will follow your ideas.
Alan, I’m still happily using QX2018, and it’s quite stable. Occasionally it will freak out and lock up, but even with a forced quit, it puts that working file in a desktop folder, which opens with everything in the file correct and intact.
I just succumbed to the half price offer from Affinity and bought all 3 apps. Haven’t played with them yet, but figured $75 for the suite isn’t much of a gamble and pulled the trigger.
Not sure if you have taken the dive into the Affinity products, but I highly recommend them. I’ve been using Photo and Designer for 3-4 years and Publisher since it was released as a Beta about 2.5 years ago. I’ve created about 7 100 page magazines using the 3 programs and have had no problems, from the programs themselves through pre-press proofs and actual printing, as well as creation of digital copies. I’ve also used the programs for everything from photo retouching jobs to postcards, CD packages, ads, posters, invitations and all sorts of designs for digital publication (social media). Publisher just keeps getting better and better (data merge was added recently). The integration between the 3 programs is light years ahead of adobe (yes, lower-case purposefully). $150 and all 3 are yours.
2 Likes
Many good comments here. Just to add to the masochist part of my Quark 2020 experience. The user interface is not for a production environment, it feels like modules were designed by separate developers, but nobody familiar with a daily desktop publishing operation actually assured acceptable user interface quality at the end. Their tech support is managed to get rid of questions; my two tech support requests were expired without any feedback. Amazingly schizophrenic user interface; for example, revising selected pages to a different master acts as a page insert without respect of the page links previously in place AND there is no Undo available for it. Quark’s InDesign conversion ability is a myth. In short, run for the hills.
1 Like
This is what is really sad…when Quark was first released it quickly blew Pagemaker, etc. away in terms of features, ease of use and speed. But at least for Mac users, things really went south very quickly when Quark did not build an OSX upgrade on a timely basis. Adobe released an OSX version immediately, IIRC, Steve Jobs emphasized this when OSX was first announced, and this version of InDesign included a lot of really beneficial new features.
Soon after, Adobe started selling packages of apps that included InDesign. Also very important for many companies and individuals, InDesign included solid packaging features, as well as features that facilitated transferring from print to web output, as well as for outdoor. And very important was that InDesign didn’t crash as frequently as Quark, though I don’t know if this is still the case. Adobe also kept upgrading and adding useful new features to InDesign, Quark sat on its rear end.
While I am sure there are multiple reasons why Quark was slow to getting a MacOS X version of QuarkXPress out, one, I believe, was technical. What made QXP 3.3 great was a reason it was hard to move. 3.3 was a tight ball of yarn. It provided very much that was good but was difficult to modify the base code. You pull on some code and you had no idea what might happen. While QXP 4 was the first step in fixing this problem and moving towards a more modular code, it still had to solve many problems by implementing them as Xtensions rather than as code changes. The result was having a new command under the menu for extensions and having the option of doing the old command or the new one that replaced the old. They just couldn’t remove the old command without breaking things. I had meetings with Quark reps a few times a year and they told me what was happening and agreed that management was aiming at the wrong solutions. By the time Quark managed to exorcise the old code we have moved to InDesign.
1 Like
What compounded this problem was the extra charges for upgrades to the third party Xtensions, though I don’t remember whether Quark charged extra for any of their own Xtensions upgrades. Quark did charge significantly every time an upgrade was released. And pretty much everybody was using Photoshop, Illustrator or Acrobat along with Quark, so there wasn’t much of a learning curve for switchers when InDesign was released. And InDesign did so much more. I don’t know if this has changed, but InDesign made transitioning layouts from between different sizes and formats much, much easier. And it also always played nice with other Adobe apps, including Dreamweaver.
When InDesign 1.0 was released one of our designers wanted to switch over right then based on typography. The Xtensions I am referring to were part of QuarkXPress package, create an XTension rather than change the code. And yes, when there was a QuarkXPress upgrade you had to pay to upgrade XTensions, but that is pretty much the case with InDesign. We don’t use many ID plug-ins but we subscribe to them rather than buy updates.