![]() InDesign offers far superior typographic controls. The graphic design industry using Quark for about 9 years and have been using Out of the two applications, in my opinion InDesign is the clear winner. ![]() (For example, make sure your service provider supports it directly, and isn't importing InDesign-created pdf's into Quark for pre-press work.) What InDesign does it does superbly. In general, I give InDesign a wholehearted recommendation, as long as it has the features you need, and as long as your worklow supports it. There is virtually nothing that *cannot* be done most limitations are regarding automagic productivity aids. There may be a few more limitations I've missed. It can be picky with printers - I recommend only using true Adobe Postscript printers (Level 3), or go through Distiller, if you are a heavyweight user. InDesign's limitations: No automatic bullets or outline numbering no automatic running heads no automatic footnotes. Typography in particular is a breeze, especially if you get OpenType fonts. InDesign's exceptional strong points: typography, integration with other Adobe applications, and scripting (automation). Of course opinions vary, but that is a common point of view. My conclusion is that InDesign is the preferred choice unless you need features it lacks. I have no experience using Quark, Ventura, or the other dpt programs but I have participated quite a lot on forums dedicated to InDesign, were the pros and cons of the various programs are discussed ad nauseum. InDesign is the most elegant, although EditPlus is close. I'm a software junkie and have 34 (I just counted) applications in my quick launch toolbar, which are the ones I use frequently. It is an extremely reliable program and lets me do my work with a minimum of fuss or frustration. I use InDesign on a daily basis, and love it. This composer combined with optical kerning and optical margin alignment can create incrediblely well composed text. The paragraph based composer is an ingenious solution to setting optimal line breaks. It supports OpenType fonts, and the expert extended character sets included in these fonts are readily accessible and easy to use. If typography is a concern (and it always should be) InDesign offers some very powerful tools. Some of these links are reviews of one product or the other, but they never fail to make a comparison between packages when discussing new features. Here is a list of articles that present a fairly unbiased, I think, look at the two packages. Now if Quark (or anyone else) came out with good, solid and viable alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign without the subscription crap that Adobe’s forced upon us, I’d switch in a heartbeat.I will say up front that I am an InDesign user and I have almost no experience with Quark. Even if I did decide to make a switch to QuarkXPress, I’d still need to keep paying out money for Adobe’s Creative Cloud in order to get the other software that comes with it, which really lessens the incentive to switch. As much as I’ve learned to dislike Adobe and their ransomware, which is rapidly turning into hatred, the monopoly they have on graphic design software is difficult extract oneself from. What I didn’t see, however, was anything that wowed me to the point of saying to myself that I really needed to buy a copy. I might change my mind on that if I actually used it for some real projects, but my initial impression was positive. I didn’t use it for anything other than experimenting, but from what I saw, I liked it. I downloaded a trial version of the newest QuarkXPress a couple of months ago and was pleasantly surprised. ![]() I know that there are loyal Quark users out there, and probably on this forum, but I would never recommend Quark over InDesign. I had been a quark user since version 1.0, and I knew as soon as I saw InDesign that Quark Xpress was in big trouble. Most Quark users also used PhotoShop and Illustrator so the user interface that InDesign used was already familiar. InDesign was built around Postscript from the start, and fully integrated with Adobe’s other flagship software, Illustrator and PhotoShop. It was better than PageMaker from Adobe, its main competitor on a number of fronts - not least of which was the user interface which was more user-friendly. Because of this, Quark Xpress always had problems, but for the most part we learned how to get around them. Quark Xpress was at one time the best you could get (going back a few years here), but they only ever licensed parts of Postscript from Adobe. ![]()
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