Quark Xpress Info

[Lhriangel]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Quark Xpress Info

Originally posted by mktiggerman
a bit of both... I find ways to use my actual stuff for a grade. Unfortunately, I have a professor who insists on Quark. I also have a project due soon that's on flash, and I haven't started yet. I can't understand flash at all. I think I may just take an F on it

Flash isn't that difficult it just takes FOREVER to get things done if you have a longer piece you are trying to do. What's the assignment?

 

[MobileBadBoy]

What is Quark anyway, if I may ask?

I've heard of it, never known what it does though.

All I know is Notepad, Photoshop, and the occasional Flash (and some minor Lightwave).

 

[MrPromey]

Originally posted by MobileBadBoy
What is Quark anyway, if I may ask?

I've heard of it, never known what it does though.

All I know is Notepad, Photoshop, and the occasional Flash (and some minor Lightwave).

Quark is actually the name of a privately held company (http://www.quark.com ). They produce a product known as QuarkXpress (which just about everyone refers to as “Quark”) which is a desktop layout program. Unless you do any serious volume of work designed for professional printing (newspaper, magazines, package design, professional advertising) you really don’t have a lot of use for it since out of the box, it doesn’t work so well with your average home printer that is lacking postscript support.

Essentially, it is for doing layouts. Say you have done the pictures in Illustrator and Photoshop and a writer has provided the copy for a news article and you are going to arrange it all to be the front page of a newspaper. You use quark to set it all up so that the copy done in any text editing program is appropriately spaced and sized with headlines around the pictures to go to print. Another use would be for an ad where you take the pictures and then type out the copy in QuarkXpress. That is pretty much it in a nutshell. There are other purposes for it and they have been trying to add things like web support (please! There are much better products out there designed exclusively for web use already – day late and a dollar short) but what I have described should give you the basic concept. Sort of like Microsoft Word for the printing world. In honestly, comparing it to Word is like comparing Photoshop to MS Paint though. (I had to add that last line so nobody else would give me a hard time )

For a long time, QuarkXpress was just about all there was on the market. Adobe offered a product called Pagemaker but it has never been highly successful. A few years back Adobe came out with a new product that totally blows the pants off of QuarkXpress called Indesign. When Quark found out about Adobe’s plans they hastily made an unsolicited offer to buy Adobe which most of the financial world saw as sort of a joke since adobe is a considerably larger (and publicly held) company than Quark. Needless to say, Adobe politely declined stating that they felt competition in this market was an important thing.

Since, Adobe has released two new versions of their product (1.5 and 2.0) both of which totally rock while Quark has released one that offers very little of significance over the previous version. Quark sat around too long with Microsoft-like monopolistic control and now that they have real competition, I don’t think they know how to deal with it.

Unfortunately for just about everyone except Quark, change is a very slow process in the print world. Unlike digital media, things have to go through different peoples hands sometimes more than once before you get to an end product and because of these workflows, changing is difficult because you have to retrain everyone and/or, get with printers that are prepared and so on and so forth. We still use Quark where I work but the work that our clients are requesting is making us rely on Photoshop more and more to make what are mostly uneditable pieces. These are things that could be done in a program like Indesign and could be kept 100% editable. I do freelance work on Indesign and would strongly encourage anyone else with a choice to go for Indesign as it is sort of the up-and-coming. If you are looking for a job today though, you need QuarkXpress because it is still what most companies are using – for now.

I know that I told you a lot more than you wanted to know but I saw this as an excellent opportunity to make my case for Indesign and say what I joke I thought the company that makes QuarkXpress is! :sohappy: