Aug. 7, 2006—When it comes to the two major players in page layout software—QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign—no one can deny that competition has only served to sharpen both. Each new release brings richer feature sets, better user interfaces, and overall improved experiences. The two firms have built loyal followings, pointing out differences in their programs. Each one carries pros and cons, however it is more than features that keep people coming back for every new release and upgrade.

“All in all, it looks like Quark has kept its promise and is truly more customer focused than it has been over the past several years,” said Brian Sheehan, MFS Investment Management, Boston. “The release of Quark 7 is significant for both designers and production personnel with powerful new tools to improve productivity and reduce problems on press. Quark’s new graphics engine and with the transparency support it provides, the introduction of job jackets for specifications checking, and the new collaboration capabilities make this release one of the most significant in the history of the product.”

“If you think about the history of Adobe...it was founded with a vision of helping people communicate consistently—essentially getting their message they saw on screen to a print device,” said Chad Siegel, senior product manager, Adobe InDesign and InCopy.

In a comparison of the products, an Adobe document noted: “Page layout applications play a key role in design and publishing workflows. The decision to switch from one page layout to another is never undertaken lightly. In August 1999, when InDesign was first released, Quark dominated the page layout market. While InDesign 1.0 drew interest, few thought it could go up against such an entrenched competitor—the sheer market investment in Quark, not to mention the loyalty of its customers, locked designers into its workflow. Now six years, and four major releases later, that trend is moving in the other direction. InDesign has intense momentum behind it—with significant adoption in the magazine, newspaper, book, advertising, and design agency markets, as well as widespread support among printers, trainers, systems integrators, developers, and others who support these publishing workflows.”


The Products: Quark
While features are not the only basis for comparing two pieces of software, they are certainly the biggest part of it. Both InDesign and QuarkXPress have gone out of their way to listen to customers and offer new and innovative facets to make page layout more than just another chore.

“A composition zone is a new feature that allows more than one person to work on the same project at the same time. For the first time in desktop page layout, the artificial limit of one person working on a page is gone. Composition zones provide the first peer-to-peer inter-document collaboration in publishing, without a server. This feature is unique to Quark,” said Scott Allan, director of marketing, Quark. “The new job jackets enable more efficient collaboration among designers, printers, output providers, or anyone in the workflow by providing a way to ingest all types of requirements before and during the creative process. Job jackets are based on JDF, but users don’t need to know a thing about JDF to use them.”

Job jackets is one of QuarkXPress 7’s new features, and is getting hearty attention. This feature allows printers, designers, and anyone in the process to set parameters on a project ahead of time, from sheet sizes, to color palettes, to trim sizes, and everything in between. Every aspect of a job can be specified.

A designer need simply run a check on the project at any stage and is alerted to anything out of spec. This moves error-catching further upstream in the production process and helps cut down on the time and money needed to correct files after they have gone to the printer.
“I’m particularly impressed with the job jackets feature. I think the ability to set print specifications that follow the job all the way to the printer is going to prevent lots of hassles on press. The fact that the designers don’t even need to deal with the specs is icing on the cake,” said Mr. Sheehan.

The Products: Adobe
“Adobe has a broad range of technologies that we are able to bring to the customer problem set,” said Mr. Siegel. “Transparency is a great example; it has been in InDesign since 2002, since version 2. We were very innovative in bringing that to market.

“We listened to our customers and understood they wanted to create those types of effects and create more visually rich layouts. The reality is that it’s not just about a feature in InDesign, it’s also about how we’ve taken that and evolved it across the whole production process.

ransparency was introduced by Photoshop. Then it evolved and became something you could apply and interact with and use in the context of page design. In the next evolution of transparency, we expanded transparency to be supported in PDF files. We have now completed that vision by having a native PDF RIP that can handle transparency. You can now preserve transparency throughout your entire workflow. The benefit to customers is that it breaks down barriers between the applications so you don’t have to lose the richness of content as it goes through the entire process.”

Adobe’s CS2 release did not have any major new features; the company instead concentrated on integrating its products, improving the overall user experience, and fine-tuning the features it already offered.

One area that received quite a bit of attention was PDF exporting. With its new PDF print engine, Adobe is following the industry trend of working in PDF for as long as possible before converting to Postscript for output. The new print engine allows printers to forego that last step and print directly from the working PDF, cutting down on chances for errors and mistakes in the conversion process and increasing the odds of getting it right the first time around.

One unique feature of all the Adobe products introduced in the CS2 release was the bridge, which allows browsing, organizing, labeling, and previewing graphic files and InDesign documents, templates, and snippets. Users can drag-and-drop assets from the bridge into InDesign layouts for increased efficiency, and embed metadata in files for ongoing tracking. Because the bridge spans all Adobe products, this allows for one central place to manage content and easily access it for use in any form.

A Different Approach
Each of the programs offer far more than just one or two big new features. Both have a wealth of tools for designers and printers to manipulate images, text, and whole projects to achieve just the right look and feel. The differences are not so much in individual features as they are in approach, which helps to explain strong feelings on both sides.

Quark has built, and continues to work toward, offering one piece of software that will do whatever the user needs it to do. This has become even more evident in the latest release, with image editing capabilities, the job jackets, and other new features.

Adobe, on the other hand, looks at its programs as part of the production workflow. The company seeks to make a variety of applications that can fit into various parts of the process, and can integrate seamlessly together. This allows Adobe to create more robust individual programs, but also means users may or may not take advantage of all they have to offer.

The difference in how the firms view page layout is what has driven the competition to new levels. Customers in both camps firmly believe their software of choice is far superior to other options, partially because of the way they work and run their operations.

Client Testimonials
“I’m staying with QuarkXPress because it’s what I’ve always used, since 1991,” said Stephanie Sharp, Sharp Designs, Hamilton, N.J. “I know all the shortcuts, and don’t want to lose productivity learning a new program. Plus, all of my files are Quark documents. I don’t want to have to go through hoops and hassles to convert them, and there’s no way I’m going to let a client down.

“I’m a solo designer, so cost is also a big issue. Why spend more money to purchase a new product compared to the upgrade price of QuarkXPress? Since I’m not an Illustrator user, the bundle and price doesn’t help from a cost standpoint. I have upgraded Acrobat and Photoshop to CS2, ” she added.

“To produce the Barnes & Noble holiday catalog, we switched from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign CS2 software and moved from spreadsheets for version tracking to a centralized database publishing system managed by a powerful plug-in from 65bit Software,” explained Peter Farago of Farago Design in New York City.

“The results have been astounding. The up-front investment was minimal and, now that InDesign CS2 is our standard page layout platform, we’ve saved hundreds of production hours on every project,” he added.