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Businesses Graphics Software

Quark CEO Abruptly Resigns 291

Posted by CowboyNeal from the still-kicking dept.
stonydell writes "According to News.com, Quark CEO Kamar Aulakh is no longer with the company. Company spokesman Glen Turpin also said, 'We hope to find a new CEO as soon as possible. It's very important we bring in some professional outside leadership to the company.' Does Quark still have a future or is the future Adobe and Macromedia?"
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Quark CEO Abruptly Resigns More

Quark CEO Abruptly Resigns

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  • Quark CEO Resigns? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Neil Blender ( 555885 ) <neilblender@gmail.com> on Thursday June 09, 2005 @11:56PM (#12777348)
    Strange.

  • Future? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09, 2005 @11:57PM (#12777353)
    Quark doesn't have present, much less a future. They've been passed (and lapped a couple of times) by InDesign long ago. Their delays in keeping up with OS compatibility; their stubornly shipping software with keydisk floppies long after Apple stopped selling machines with floppy drives; they're not the only game in town and frankly, they're not the best game in town, so if they're gone, I for one won't miss them.

    • Re:Future? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:00AM (#12777384)
      Indesign will let you delete all styles in use without complaint. Quark will
      warn you that a style you're are trying to delete is in use.

      There is no kerning table edit. This is very important to me as in some
      fonts certain things like an f followed by a i grave can be a problem.
      Optical kerning is not a substitute. I want to control this myself. In
      any case, Optical Kerning can't be applied in advance to specific
      characters. It would be a search and replace option.

      Importing text from Word seems fine until you apply a style to a portion
      of text. All page-breaks will disappear. You can't search for
      page-breaks or use the Find and Replace to insert page-breaks. This is a
      major irritation.

      It doesn't make automatic backup files. This can be very important if
      you want to go back. I try to remember to make manual backups in
      InDesign, but it's just one more thing to remember.

      Using a discretionary hyphen can be a nightmare (in version 2.02 at
      least). First, hyphenation has to be switched on in the paragraph, so it
      will hyphenate the whole paragraph. To avoid this (I'm often working in
      Gaelic) I have to make the whole paragraph No Language. If I then type
      an apostrophe it comes out as non-smart. Has this been fixed in the CS
      version? In Quark I just use the discretionary hyphen, end of story.

      En-dashes are breaking always. The only way to make them non-breaking is
      to use the No Break option. Date ranges must have a non-breaking en
      dash. There should be one available, and this should be the default in
      imported text. However, the No Break option is useful in other
      circumstance, so it is a Good Thing.

      In Quark you can globally change the H&J parameter if you want. In
      InDesign you have to do it style by style.

      The general feel of InDesign for me is that it is full of tricks and
      very full of itself and it is up to me to keep up and pay attention or
      it is going to catch me out. I feel Quark is on my side and is more
      forgiving. For instance, if you want to change a style, in Quark there
      is no chance of applying it by accident because you would be in the Edit
      Style sheets menu.

      Obviously there are things I really like about InDesign, notably the
      paragraph composer, and the extensive Find capabilities, such a
      searching for a colour, but generally I still feel more comfortable in
      Quark, although almost everything I do is now in InDesign because of
      Opentype fonts. I haven't upgraded Quark from 4.1 but I am seriously
      considering going back on this next version. It seems I am alone in the
      universe if this newsgroup is anything to go by, but yes, I do like
      Quark. I feel there's a solidity to it. But then I don't print
      transparency or gradients. I'm a plain text and normal graphics and
      maps person. And I don't really mind not importing photoshop files
      direct.

      • Re:Future? (Score:5, Funny)

        by poopdeville ( 841677 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:30AM (#12777537)
        Christ on a cracker, I'm so glad I use TeX instead of any of these things.
        • Yeah, and the reason I switched to Indesign was TeX. Chist that is a bad shit program. IF you are not writing papers, that it, because that is ALL Tex is good for.
      • It sounds like you are talking about the 1.0 version (or 2.0?) of ID... 2.0 was the first usable version imo, with CS I went mission critical.

        IDCS addressed many (though I doubt all) of your concerns.

        m-

      • Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Craig Ringer ( 302899 )
        I find your comments very interesting. I'ts the first I've heard of really solid areas that Quark does things better, but I can see what you mean. I'll have to investigate those areas with the layout staff at work and see how they feel.

        Quark's probably going to get replaced at work soon, because I just can't get it to do simple things right. The single biggest problem is it's handling of EPS and PDF. Save as EPS is buggy, and doesn't embed TrueType fonts even when told to. Placing PDFs on the page is a scr

      • Re:Future? (Score:5, Funny)

        by mkro ( 644055 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @02:31AM (#12777907)
        This is very important to me as in some fonts certain things like an f followed by a i grave can be a problem.
        So true. A female colleague of mine found out the hard way when she was demonstrating a client's cd labeling software on the big screen.

        The cd label said "FINAL FANTASY", but only until she selected a bolder typeface.
      • Maybe you just haven't become fully familiar with all of the features in InDesign. This may, in fact, be a pattern with you. For example, Slash supports automatic word wrap so that you don't have to manually break every line like that.
    • I've been doing this stuff a long time... I remember ReadySetGo! even, before xPress. What was that short-lived partial replacement... (Design Studio? something like that.)

      In the way back days, xPress was designed with a more production-oriented, grid-format bent than Pagemaker, (not that that was hard to do in those days.) It was very good at some things, not so good at others, but it worked.

      Personally, I loathed it. It seemed very inflexible. When I had a choice, I would even use Pagemaker instead. (tha
      • Quark botched its OS X transition. It was bloody awfull, it took a long long long time. Remember being presented with a new copy of Quark and a brand new iMac - without a floppy for the installer ? Time to kill some more brain cells, I'll get those eventually.

        Newspapers on the other hand love Quark. They have highly automated systems that work very, very well. Lots of AppleScript. I haven't seen the kind of takeup for heavily scripting InDesign - not sure if it will support it. Besides, anyone who tells a

    • Re:Future? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Ilgaz ( 86384 )
      Really? Do you work at a newspaper for instance? Those things selling million copies you know.

      Or you design e.g. a Coca Cola ad will be published in 90 countries?

      You guys too easily "kill" companies let me say. Quark is going nowhere, people still use Quark Express .

      Its amazing people dare to say "xxx is dead" because they didn't see it running at next door pirate home user.

      • Quark is going nowhere
        You got that right! Quark does the least it has to to maintain it's code. It wasn't until QE 6.5 that the interface on OS X looked good. v3.32 is still the most stable version I've seen and it runs quite nicely under classic...

        Mike

  • Slow. . . (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jm92956n ( 758515 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @11:57PM (#12777355) Journal
    I'm taking bets now. How long will Quark take to port their software to the next-generation Intel-based Macs? Six months? Two years?

    They blew it last time around. They had a wonderful product, but you can only screw your customers so many times before they start to get mad.

    • Re:Slow. . . (Score:5, Interesting)

      by networkBoy ( 774728 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:01AM (#12777387) Journal
      assuming they ported to OSX "properly" there should be no problems.

      AFAIK they're software has no reason to make direct hardware calls, so the hardware change should be transparent to them, as long as the OS APIs don't change.
      -nB

      • Re:Slow. . . (Score:3, Insightful)

        by QuantumG ( 50515 )
        heh, you're presuming they still have all the source code for their product. Don't be surprised when you learn that half your favourite applications still havn't been ported cause they're waiting for their outsourced programmers in India to finish rewriting a bunch of libraries they've been linking to for years and years with no source code.

      • Re:Slow. . . (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jm92956n ( 758515 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:11AM (#12777453) Journal
        The transition from OS 9.x to OS X was far more important than the transition from PPC to x86 will be. While the former was not at all transparent to the average user, the latter most definitely will be.

        Everyone knew OS X was coming, and every major application had a version released either at the time of OS X's release, or shortly thereafter.

        Except Quark. People were forced to continue to use the OS 9 version, and it was during this period that Adobe took the lead. They took far too much time to release a new version. This time around, at least according to Apple, compiling a new version can be done within days. And I'm sure Quark will still manage to blow it.

        • *Apple* was forced to continue making and shipping old G4s that could run OS9, mainly so people could keep using Quark. The company really has no direction, nor does it seek to satisfy the needs of their clients.

          • Re:Slow. . . (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Ilgaz ( 86384 )
            Besides running the "greatest" and "latest" OS, why would that bother a DTP professional uses that huge Mac for design on a Apple Talk network?

            I mean OS X native or not.

            • Re:Slow. . . (Score:3, Insightful)

              by gobbo ( 567674 )
              Besides running the "greatest" and "latest" OS, why would that bother a DTP professional uses that huge Mac for design on a Apple Talk network? ... I mean OS X native or not.

              Quark crashes. + Time is money. + Rebooting is slow = OS X smart for a DTP professional. Graphics apps crash, as do the many specialized and networking apps used in publishing. Having an OS that doesn't require rebooting is just money in the bank.

      • Quark rarely does anything properly when it comes to platform support. Their first major release after OS/X came out just fixed the worst of the hacks so it ran OK under MacOS 9 emulation (Classic). They then charged another large upgrade fee to get one that ran natively... and I'd be shocked if that wasn't still chock full of MacToolbox calls and other elderly crud.

      • Re:Slow. . . (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Maserati ( 8679 )
        There's one hardware call any program is entitled to make: to the FPU. If the Quark programmers came up with some neat tricks using the FPU on the 68000-series to speed redraw or something, then that code will break into tiny jagged pieces on a 601. The first series of PowerPC chips didn't have FPUs. They didn't really need one as the CPU was 'good enough' at floating-point math. But not in such a way that a codebase relying on an FPU can be ported short of a complete re-write. It's also possible to use flo

    • Re:Slow. . . (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EggyToast ( 858951 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:06AM (#12777422) Homepage
      Yep, exactly. They had a near-monopoly on desktop publishing on OS9. Then Quark 5 comes out, late, buggy as hell, and... for OS9... well after OS X has been out (I think it came out right when 10.2 hit, which is when OS X started to pick up steam). Why release a new product ONLY on an old OS? It's like releasing an app that ONLY works on Win 98 right when Win2k comes out!

      Then it takes them forever to release an OS X version, Quark 6. Which, while at least as stable as Quark 4, shows little real improvements. No attempts to incorporate new technology, little admission that there are new and often better formats for saving and exporting data.

      InDesign comes out from the burnt remains of PageMaker as an OS X only application, and people start looking at it seriously. They really push it forward with the "CS" version, and it's really a solid product at that time. Now CS2 is out, with very solid XML support and just all around improvements. It's really drastically replacing desktop publishing applications.

      I work with hundreds of different non-profit journals in my work, and we've seen an extremely drastic shift to InDesign. Even WE are moving to InDesign, for exporting documents to XML. InDesign accepts more formats, works with documents from those formats easier, and exports to such a variety that it's really become a great application.

      Quark really blew it.

      • I noticed the same thing. They used to be the reason a lot of people had Macs. They did it to themselves though... Didn't they lay off everybody here and hired all new engineers in India? To this day, they are still having problems with OS X, let alone a switch to Intel.

    • Re:Slow. . . (Score:5, Interesting)

      by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:44AM (#12777589) Homepage
      WORD!

      My company made the decision to move to Adobe InDesign inspite of a tremendous technical investment to stay based, IMO, entirely on the ridiculous price Quark expects for their tool. (The one program cost more than the entire AdobeCS at the time of the decision.) I think it's a case of them over-valuing themselves and essentially abusing the almost-monopoly they once had. (And thanks to the BSA, my company is also reducing the use of Microsoft software at every opportunity as well... it's a slow and careful process.)

      I don't care how big and important you become. Don't piss off your customers.

    • Re:Slow. . . (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NMerriam ( 15122 ) <NMerriam@artboy.org> on Friday June 10, 2005 @01:22AM (#12777713) Homepage
      They had a wonderful product

      They had a widely used product. Wonderful, it hasn't been for almost 10 years. The only new ground Quark has broken since 1997 or so is in finding revolutionary and cutting-edge ways to antagonize their own customers and abuse a near-monopoly.

      I wish somebody would just take this company out back and shoot it so we can get everyone on InDesign already.
      • Parent really is insightful.

        I used to be a hardcore Quark user and admin for many years (admined Quark the Quark Publshing System servers, all that workflow jazz). I liked the product. This was all about 5 years ago, just before version 4 came out.

        but even back then the company really knew how to annoy their customers. They used to do fabulous stuff like issue point releases that couldn't write backwardly compatible files. Then they would stop selling the older point release.

        The result? A department wit
    • (Lead coder)-Sir, we finally made Quark a pure native program running on OS X

      (CEO)- Great! Call the PR guys, our sales will explode!

      Sits happily, turns on CNBC with a whiskey in hand...

      CNBC- "Apple CEO Steve Jobs said they are giving up PowerPC platform for Intel CPUs and analysts predict it may create compatibility problems with current professional applications.

      He starts packing his desktop...

  • Maybe he had a brain hemorrhage (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Thursday June 09, 2005 @11:57PM (#12777357) Journal
    I did when I was reading their website:

    Paving the way for custom publishing in a multiple-channel environment with industry-leading design, page layout, publishing, enterprise workflow, personalization, and content management software.

  • Quark who? ;) (Score:3, Informative)

    by _undan ( 804517 ) <dan@undumb.com> on Thursday June 09, 2005 @11:59PM (#12777372)
    They still have a future, albeit it's winding down. There's still enough designers and print houses out there using Quark in their workflow that they'll be around for a bit more, but I can't see them growing any more.

    Their biggest problem was not getting Quark to OS X fast enough. Quark used to be one of the killer apps for the Mac platform - Adobe got Photoshop there, but Quark took far too long, and Adobe got them with PageMaker/InDesign.
    • Their biggest problem was not getting Quark to OS X fast enough.

      No, their biggest problem was that when they finally released it for OS X, it was (and still is) a horrendously buggy piece of crap, not to mention the awfully implemented product activation system. I am not a Quark user, but I do IT work for a lot of small design and print houses, and there hasn't been one Quark 6 install that has ever happened cleanly. Hours worth of clients time and money wasted on us calling India to get the damn thing

  • sudden resignation - the reason (Score:5, Interesting)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @11:59PM (#12777374) Journal
    According to a friend who works at Quark (and is busy trying to find a more secure job), the dude's got testicular cancer. :o

    • Re:sudden resignation - the reason (Score:4, Funny)

      by Motherfucking Shit ( 636021 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:04AM (#12777408) Journal
      According to a friend who works at Quark (and is busy trying to find a more secure job), the dude's got testicular cancer. :o
      In light of that revelation, I don't think I want to know what that emoticon at the end of your comment is all about...
    • Testicular cancer is one of those cancers that can be caught and treated successfully if found early. Unfortunately, it's not exactly one of those tests that you so willingly sign up for. You usually go in for examination when you notice some symptoms and by that point it's already too late. It's a lot like prostate cancer in that regard.

      Good luck to this guy.

      • Re:If it's true, it's really sad (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Crowhead ( 577505 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:31AM (#12777547)
        You usually go in for examination when you notice some symptoms and by that point it's already too late.

        Yes, people: DO NOT IGNORE IRREGULARITIES IN YOUR NUTS. If you feel pain or growth, go to a doctor. You can be embarassed or you can be dead. Your choice. If you find out early enough, it's no big deal. If you find out mid range, it can plague you for the rest of your live (via relapse), if you find out too late, you're dead. The difference between early and too late can be as little as two to six months.

        20-35 year olds be especially vigilant.

  • Quark better have a future (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MikeBeck ( 592081 ) <mbeck @ s f s u . edu> on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:03AM (#12777404)
    Adobe and Macromedia should help in the search. Has the FTC approved the Adobe's purchase of Macromedia? If Quark goes under or looks like it's gonna, the FTC is going to have a hard time approving Adobe's and Macromedia's merger.

  • I hate Quark (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:04AM (#12777413) Homepage
    Quark is as good as dead, and has been since InDesign 2.0 came out. Their customer service has always been terrible, they're more concerned about being hyper-vigilant about anyone violating their licensing than they are helping out paying customers. They were way too slow to release an OS X native version. The product itself has always been pretty solid and powerful, but they're still too tied to print output and haven't come along with the rest of the world on this whole internet medium thing.
    • When I worked at a newspaper, Quark was the only adequate layout package and there's a lot of stuff I really like - print layout is totally awesome. But now InDesign is virtually ubiquitous.

      Our marketing guy was lamenting the fact that folks are slow to upgrade; unfortunately, he finally had to downgrade from Adobe CS2 to Adobe CS.

    • I don't know about "hate," but you make good points.

      The publishing house I work for [condenast.com] - 37 consumer titles and a bunch of B-to-B - is in the process of migrating EVERYONE away from Quark and their workflow Publishing System to InDesign and k4. I don't think we were the first or the last. That's gotta hurt.

      our migration is by no means solely "away from Quark": it's been good, but InDesign / K4 is apparently pretty compelling.

    • Quark customer service (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Snap E Tom ( 128447 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:31AM (#12777548)
      And remember, their customer-hostile policies were directly driven by this ass of a CEO. He's the one that allegedly said "All customers are liars, thieves, and bastards" in an exec meeting. Everyone was screaming for an OS X version of Quark it took them how many years to come out with one? You can certainly make a point that Quark was the biggest obstructionist in OS X's adoption by keeping the publishing company on hold. Good riddance. Without this guy, maybe a Intel Mac version of Quark will be released in a reasonable time.

      • Re:Quark customer service (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Sorry, you are thinking of Fred Ebrahimi, who left in February 2004 to tend macadamia nuts in Hawaii. He co-founded Quark with Tim Gill. If memory serves, he made the famous remark at MacWorld, where there are usually some, uh, customers lurking about.
    • I don't want to sound cliche here on Slashdot but I think they should try and invest into providing a Linux version of their software. I think they are so far behind and a bold move like that might still save them, of course it could also kill them after they invest all that time=money into it, but I think they are almost as good as dead now anyway.

      If a group of desktop publishers use just that particular application and it looks the same as it does on windows or mac osx then a small company can save some

      • Even if they wanted to, I think you'll find that Quark can't. Their app is really messy and not very portable - it was apparently a screaming nightmare just to port from MacOS 9 to MacOS X.

        My understanding is that they'd have to rewrite quite a bit of it to do a proper Linux port. I guess they could port the win32 version using WINELib, though.

        At this point, it doesn't matter much. Until Adobe ports Photoshop, nobody will care. If Adobe ports Photoshop, chances are they'll port Acrobat and InDesign instea
      • For basic use, Scribus is a pretty decent Linux application.
    • but they're still too tied to print output...

      My head asplode!

      I have logged a lot of hours on QuarkXPress and I have never wished for MORE Internet features.

  • How rich was his parachute?
  • to hear that Quark was still around. It is not a name I have heard in about 5 years.

  • To hell with Quark (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:19AM (#12777487)
    Everybody knows they suck. QuarkXPress was so cool a long time ago that it has had this incredible lingering effect, feeding the bloated and immovable corpse that was its corporate parent. The only thing I think I can ever recall them doing other than grinding out ever-crappier and protection-ridden versions of Quark was to reach out and squash mTropolis [cbd-hq.com], which was the one bloody thing that could have freed me from another 2 years of Director purgatory. Now they are imploding because they hired a crappy outsourced team to do their Mac version for OS X, several years late, sucking in new and interesting ways, milking the print industry a little more before InDesign delivers the coup de grace.

    I know that seems like a huge stream of venom, but honestly, can anyone disagree? They're as bad as Commodore was in the late stages.

  • been a long time... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it's a little off topic, but i've actually purchased
    Quark products...like 20 years ago.

    I owned a copy of Word Juggler /// for my Apple ///,
    and later had a version for the //e - as well as the
    Quark Catalyst desktop/file manager for the Apple //e.

    I hear they sorta went into the typesetting/ Desktop Publishing/ photo editing bees-nest once they shifted to Macintosh products - well, good luck widdat.

    Not too many software companies can boast that they're still around after 20+ years.

  • good riddance to quark (Score:4, Interesting)

    by admactanium ( 670209 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:51AM (#12777614) Homepage
    honestly, as an art director who used quark for 12 years, i have not on twinge of pain as quark dies a slow death. this, from someone who made their living being, in many people's opinion "the fastest quark user they've ever seen." they got extremely arrogant and decided they didn't need to bother improving their product since they HAD a monopoly.

    when our agency switched to indesign, i decided the best thing to do was to just deal with the pain of switching at once and get onboard. i haven't looked back since. there are some things that quark does well (some of the hotkeys are still better). but we were the first large-scale roll-out of indesign for a whole creative department and production studio. nearly every art director and production artist had sworn off quark altogether within a few months.

    quark is this decades syquest. believe you can fleece your customers forever with unreasonably high prices, very little innovation and a big fat monopoly and it will bite you in the ass. quark used to cost more than the whole adobe creative suite (might still if i even cared enough to look it up).

  • Quark's Color Management is a nightmare (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ChuckleBug ( 5201 ) * on Friday June 10, 2005 @12:56AM (#12777628) Journal
    I work in digital color management, and Quark's CM is unusable. Well, not quite unusable, just horrible. We've never been able to figure out what it's doing with ICC profiles. The best you can do is let a RIP do it all and hope Quark doesn't do anything weird upstream.

    Problem is, so many prepress houses have used Quark for so long, they're stuck with it until they get up the gumption to undergo what may be a painful migration to InDesign.

    With all the delays in OS compatibility, the color management nightmare, and all the other problems that have been metioned elsewhere, I can't imagine using it. They act as if they hate their customers.
  • Back when Quark was "The Tim & Fred Show" it was obvious that Tim Gill was the heart and soul of Quark, and Fred was the looney that was the source of Quark's problems. I know Tim retired many years ago, and it seems the company's fortunes took a dive around that time.

    I know they have had something of a musical chairs in the executive ranks for a while and Fred kept pulling stunts (like moving the company to Wyoming!)

    I'm just thinking if Fred is still around then this guy had enough of Ebrahimi and ba
    • Fred is around, but his daughter Sasha (a MIT PhD in some bio-science) is now in charge.

      As for Fred moving the company to Wyoming - wrong. He moved it to a little corner of India that was Kamar's hometown - Mohali, near Chandigahr.

      Quark's new home is low-tech, even by local standards... and a hard place to convince good programmers to relocate to... when there are better jobs and opportunities in Bangalore, Mumbai, etc.

  • quarkvsindesign.com (Score:4, Informative)

    by Allen Varney ( 449382 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @01:10AM (#12777680) Homepage

    QuarkVsInDesign.com [quarkvsindesign.com] is an interesting site for desktop publishing professionals, run by one "Pariah S. Burke," that covers the rivalry between the programs. As you can see from the many comments on this March 29th thread, Quark : Postcards From the Edge [quarkvsindesign.com], the animosity toward Quark has grown pervasive.

  • Quark quit his job? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @01:23AM (#12777715)
    The Grand Nagus will be displeased.

  • "Does Quark still have a future or is the future Adobe and Macromedia?"

    If you have to ask that, then you know nothing about the design industry. Quark is a superior product to its competitors, it has features that far surpass the next best offering (Indesign). There are plugins for Quark and other products written for Quark which you won't find for Indesign as well, a lot of which are very important, so important its strange how Adobe havn't tackled them yet.

    Indesign can't touch Quark for its pagina

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)

      by admactanium ( 670209 )

      Indesign can't touch Quark for its pagination features alone. If you have a complex print job anybody with half an ounce of self respect for their time will use Quark. With Indesign you have to jump through hoops as do the printers, they hate it.

      the printers go as the clients go. i've heard of print shops basically going out of business because they insist on taking quark files only and excluding indesign files.

      your opinion might be that quark is vastly superiot indesign. but the transition is happeni

    • That you, Fred?

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Informative)

      by Udo Schmitz ( 738216 )
      Quark is a superior product to its competitors, it has features that far surpass the next best offering (Indesign).

      Like, for example ...?

      [...] I had to re-arrange all the pages into a print order myself (Quark does it for you)[...]

      LOL. No, InDesign doesn't have an imposer built in. Get a plugin like InBooklet. For soemeone who brags about knowing "the design industry" you are not well informed. And quick, tell me: Why is the company who makes InBooklet, producing imposing software for QuarkXpress as we

  • A lot of people dis Quark becuase of that Mac issue. As if every corporation hasn't had an executive who spouted off something out of anger. I'm not defending him so much that I'm pointing out that he was under enough pressure that I think anyone would be frustrated. Even though OSX was a great thing for Apple, it created nightmares for thousands.

    Quark in a lot of areas is better as a previous poster went into detail on. Adobe's commercial and educational prices have creeped up in the last couple years.

  • Quark? That old thing? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Friday June 10, 2005 @01:48AM (#12777785)
    The only good Quarks are the one that owns the bar on a space station, and the one that captained a space garbage truck and had identical blonde twins (okay, one was a clone of the other one) as crew. Any other Quark with a capital Q is dead to me. Dead, I tell you.

  • They're going down anyway (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @01:53AM (#12777793) Homepage Journal
    Does Quark still have a future or is the future Adobe and Macromedia?"

    Franlkly, Quark lost when InDesign 2.0 came out. Since then, the upgrade path has widely been considred to be Quark 4 -> InDesign 2 -> InDesign CS . Quark 6 ? Yeah .... I heard they released that.

    One of the biggest reasons for that is probably that Quark 4 -> Quark 6 and Quark 5 -> Quark 6 upgrades used to cost more than a new copy of InDesign. This, guys, is a really bad plan for keeping marketshare.

    Quark's prices have plummeted, but even so all they really have going for them is that most designers are more familiar with Quark. Their technology is embarrassingly inferior in features, reliability, and pretty much everything else.

    To top it off, Quark hasn't lost it's customer-hostile attitude to sales and support. Adobe will listen to you, and might even act on what you say. You don't get that from Quark. They pissed off a lot of customers while they had them locked in, and now those customers are jumping ship as fast as they can.

    In short ... if I was the Quark CEO, I'd be looking for other work too. Unless the company pulls their head out in a hurry, I'd expect them to lose more than just their CEO.

  • Die you MFs, die! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mmmuttly ( 631983 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @02:25AM (#12777889)
    As someone who spent from 88-94 dealing with Xpress 5hrs+ a day, those pricks can't die fast enough to suit me. No - I take that back. I want them to suffer a slow, painful, humiliating death. Drag it out so that Macrodobe does get fat and arrogant too fast. Try calling their customer "service" and look forward to being trated like a criminal. Wait and wait and wait for an OS upgrade that isn't worth a crap. Pay for multiple film outputs because their color management blows chunks. If it weren't for the momentum they had with service bureaus and Pagemaker dropping the ball back around 1990, their customer base would have abandoned them ages ago.

  • I Pray (Score:3, Interesting)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @05:02AM (#12778358) Journal
    I pray that Quark will finally release the source code, or at least sell it cheaply, of mTropolis, the multimedia tool that was rated as the best thing out there ever. That way it could finally get moved to modern platforms, such as WinXP, OSX and Linux. Quark, in Fred "The Iranian bastard" Ibrahimi's infinite wisdom, bought the product from mFactory, then spent about a year developing a new version but never doing any marketing or advertising whatsoever, and then killed the product outright, claiming that not enough people were buying it.

    The stupid bastards then refused to release or sell the code at a decent price (They wanted over a milllion plus final control of any later product and a guarantee that user would no longer swear and curse at Quark in public for being the bunch of stupid greedy blind fuckups that they are). That situation never changed, and even though Quark finally got rid of Ibrahimi (may his soul burn in hell for all eternity, or better yet, may he have to answer user support calls in hell for all eternity), nothing has changed.

    Quark is still just as dumb and stupid and greedy as they always were.

  • Adobe or Adobe (Score:2, Insightful)

    by smartdreamer ( 666870 )
    Does Quark still have a future or is the future Adobe and Macromedia?
    I guess we should say "Does Quark still have a future or is the future Adobe and ... well Adobe".

  • Why I hate Quark (Score:5, Insightful)

    by efudddd ( 312615 ) on Friday June 10, 2005 @08:14AM (#12779002)
    Like many others in graphics, I loved the program Quark in the old days (say, version 3.32 up to 4.1.1) but loathed the company. Nowadays there's no need to make any distinction, since 6 is such a non-starter. There are so many reasons to actively despise the company, all revolving around their contempt for their users. Some of my faves:

    * Pioneered 40+ alphanumeric registration code printed as a single block in highly condensed type. No, it's not a big thing, but a great introduction to their general attitude.

    * When the Mac moved from 68k to the PowerPC chip, companies started producing fat binaries of programs that worked on both kinds of machines. ALL of the major Mac companies did this... except Quark, which released a separately priced PPC-alone version.

    * In 2002 then-head of Quark Fred Ebrahimi said at a Quark "executive summary" that "the Macintosh platform is shrinking" and anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should "switch to something else" although moving to InDesign would be "suicide."

    * Dragged their feet on an OS X version until Steve Jobs could joke about "holdouts" and everybody knew who he was talking about. They were dead last transitioning to OS X, and the 6.0 upgrade had nothing new from 5 other than OS X compatibility.

    * Killed their own user-to-user forum around the time of the 6 release (it's back now)

    * If you run a small LAN and can't afford site licensing, you'll love Quark 6's paranoid active registration. Beyond the arcane installation, the rights are for a single machine, not single user! The registration is hardware-specific: if your hard drive crashes, or if you clone your system to a new drive, you have to reactivate the software. For our group, using automated activation didn't work for three of five upgrades, and I wound up on the phone begging Bangalore for activation numbers. I now slate an hour of frustration for each upgrade or reinstall of this program.

    * Quark 6 still doesn't play nice with PDFs. PDFs are now the industry standard, but we've experienced various strangeness in Quark's direct PDF output and can't trust it for high-end jobs.

    So why are people still using it? In our case, backlog of files. We have InDesign CS and are using it for new work and pickups. Quark would be in the dumpster except for old jobs. Going back now because they might mend their ways? Too little, too late.

    My boss knows my long-time disgust with Microsoft, and once asked which I hated more, Microsoft or Quark? It stopped me cold, and I finally just had to say "Yes."

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