Does anyone still use quarkxpress

We would lose one specific layout every month. And there was no comparison in the quality of typography, ID was better.

QuarkCopyDesk had so many weaknesses that we had to give our copy editors QuarkXPress, which gave them the opportunity to make mischief, often by accident. Adobe InCopy was so much better than QuarkCopyDesk that no one in editorial needed a layout program anymore, much to the joy of designers.

Yes, you can get plugins for QXP to give it added capabilities, but I was often not satisfied with the UI integration. And the more plugins it seemed to me the less stable the program. In moving to InDesign was a no brainer, almost all magazines similar to ours had already made the change. We are testing the Affinity products. Maybe in years these areas of weakness will be fixed. I am hoping one of our recently retired production staff will buy the Affinity products so she can report to me how much she likes them.

The big issue is weather or not I will find it accurately and speedily accomplishes what I will need it to do. Another issue is how it will handle working on stuff created in InDesign, and how effectively something I hand off to an InDesign user can be managed. It is a multi-platform, open source, page layout program that seems to have all of the basic features of one.

You most certainly cannot argue about the price as it is free, but supported by donations. It seems to be in the category of LibreOffice and Project Libre but for page layout. I have not actually used it in detail but from what I have seen of if it might be a great alternative. It also comes with excellent documentation. I did my first layouts and books in Quark back in the late Eighties. In the Nineties it was the app for designers, photoshop and illustrator feeding into it.

I knew it inside out, I loved training designers with it, bringing them up to speed. It was the first app I knew which did basic math in inspectors, once designers saw a page height being divided by a number to set a box height or a box width being used to set step and repeat their eyes would light up….

But it was always a pain on registration, default position was you were a thief. I withstood the Adobe juggernaut as long as I could but studios needed what it brought. What I liked, and still like, about XPress, is that it was understandable to someone who was taught blue lines and waxing. Moving from a physical to a digital workflow made sense with XPress. And I appreciated the small, smooth, and intuitive GUI. The arrogance of the company was astounding. I remember a period where you were billed for reporting bugs.

I was even on the QuarkImmedia team as a high-level consultant user, or whatever title they gave us. Which gives you an idea of how the company valued its staff.

I should add that QuarkImmedia was a brilliant product, ahead of its time, but it died on the vine. So, I called my colleagues at Quark, and pleaded with them to send someone to the university to demonstrate the upcoming OS X version, and they refused to do so. Keep in mind that we were one of the initial universities to feature XPress in our design curriculum, starting with the initial release, so we had a long record with the company.

In the end, we never received any demo, or access to a beta version of the OS X version. To make things worse, XPress utilized its own home-brew license server, compared to Adobe which allowed us to use Sassafras to serve up licenses. So, an additional headache for our IT staff. And since we already used Photoshop, Illustrator, and other apps, getting InDesign for free, as it was bundled in, was a no-brainer. This reminds me of RSG Ready, Set, Go , which was another fast, easy to use, and capable page layout program, who, through a variety of new owners, seems to have become a ghost.

OMG, I forgot all about this horrific disaster! Quark could have released what would have prevented Dreamweaver from becoming a success, but they released a totally unworkable product. The idea was that Immedia would enable a printed magazine or newspaper to be magically morphed into web pages.

But it was released in the days of dial up modems, a limited palette of colors, so nothing worked, looked or downloaded effectively. At the time, there already were apps and Xtensions that would convert Quark pages into interactive HTML that was viewable in a web browser.

And PDF viewers were already established in the market, and PDFs downloaded faster than Immedia documents, and rendered type, images and links beautifully. At least Flash managed a brief time in the sun before Steve Jobs and iPhone dropped an atom bomb on it. Indesign is the Microsoft Word of page layout: it does the job, but quite inelegantly. I work almost exclusively in Indesign now and curse it almost every day.

It takes 2 or 3 usually mysterious extra steps to do anything, and yes it crashes. For technical support at all levels, the Facebook group is very helpful. This really chimes with my experience of InDesign, as someone who has also used multiple incarnations of Word on both Mac and Windows.

I tried importing only one layout this way, but it seemed to work. The app in its and versions were both horrors. Even worse than their performance was the support! Affinity is a far, far better choice for the Mac user. Thank you! Ready, Set, Go! Three inches wide, 11 over 15, not too loose, you know the way I like it. It was nice but I never fell in love with it like others have.

My path was similar. Though I am in IT so I do more support work in these apps than any design work in them. No RSG for me. First stop - Pagemaker, then Quark, then InDesign. I used PageMaker starting in PageMaker was easy to use but just too sloppy; it was too easy to get things out of alignment. The lesser applications: SwiftPublisher is just not powerful enough; I can do all that it does in NisusWriter, and have regular expressions and macros to boot!

AffinityPublisher — I know people swear by the Affinity apps, but got so frustrated by AffinityPhoto that I gave up and shifted to Acorn.

And Publisher seems to have been designed by the same people…. You just have to learn to think in terms of text boxes more than pages. You should have seen version 1. Which is more expensive in the long run, a one-time project to learn XPress — or the rest of your life spent paying Adobe for InDesign?

Of course, that should be taken with a grain of salt. I seem to have a deep fondness for programs that are very powerful but fairly obscure and die of something-or-other, from FrameMaker to 4th Dimension to FileMaker Developer to come to think of it writing programs in Pascal, or at least C, rather than Objective-C.

You all have me looking at my vintage desktop publishing magazines that just happen to be in my bedroom. Personal Publishing magazine from Feb It was a PC only publishing magazine that disdained Macs.

Magazine content varied. Some were more into hardware and software. The better ones realized that many readers were publishing neophytes so they include basics of page layout and non-layout issues such as copyright. What a nightmare. For academic type work, many swear by Mellel but the typography is apparently not good enough for commercial work although the latest version will do ePub format automatically. We are selling off all our perpetual CS6 licenses we iwb about three or four Design and Production Suites.

But once InDesign and the Creative Suite became a monopoly the new standard , Adobe switched to their current subscription plan and have turned into a money-grubbing monster just like the old Quark and it sounds like the current Quark. Affinity Publisher sort of does that, too. The beta versions mostly felt like Serif had hoped users would paste documents directly into a layout rather than expect to import them.

The company has been responsive to feedback from users, but my sense is they are still behind the curve in this regard. It does integrate nicely with other Affinity software.

Not every one needs the same toolchain and some can adapt their workflow. The professional magazine and other print industries can afford the insane pricing of Adobe. But a lot of smaller less automated scenarios, Affinity is worth a good hard look. You mean like this?

Or this: And this:. This is troubling. QuarkXPress projects paid all or most of my wages through the early s. After that, I put together dozens of simple books with it, plus magazines. Two or three years ago, I put together a book for a client with the new version. While tech support was nightmarish in the early days for many reasons not mentioning here, I have long found that, for the kind of work I do, QuarkXPress was faster and more predictable.

Just FYI: Quark offers a year of free tech support with a new purchase, same with purchase of an upgrade. After that, continued tech support is optional. So I do not understand why the writer of the article says Quark wanted payment for such support.

Combined with BBEdit, it was, and remains, a publishing powerhouse. My grief over Adobe buying and then immediately killing FreeHand made me seriously question the company, and I will not succumb to the Adobe subscription model. I am saddened that Charles has had so many problems, but QXP has been very stable for me and the rare technical support I have ever required has been graciously given.

I wish him well, but ask others to consider that his experiences with QXP are not universal. Read all the comments and it was a trip down memory lane. Remember the troublesome upgrading path of v3, and all its headaches under OS9, moved onto v4 for a spell, then v5 which I believe was the OSX update. Used v6 until I retired and seem to remember it was very stable, flexible and as others have noted coded for true typographers who cut their teeth with Xacto knives and always had wax on their fingers.

None of this phony CAD stuff. My only beef with Quark was that it just stopped working back in or so. A lot of people complained, but the cure was just to set the date on your computer back a couple of years and it resurrected OK.

Still doing that when I [rarely] crank it up for an odd job. Like QXP it addresses layout in conventional terms and is designed to meet the needs of the user, not arbitrary Silicon Valley dictates. And, besides, nobody reads documentation. The authors of this book are not stupid people. In the olden days, publishing workflows included source-content creators, editors, fact-checkers, blah-blah, specialists of all kinds, just to create the content.

Illustrators whose skills were not just artistic, but conceptual - how to make some kind of graphic example of an idea that could clearly communicate a literal thought quickly visually. This was as collaborative as creating a theatrical movie. A team of skilled professionals. If you want a modern example, just patiently look at the credits for any Ken Burns, Frontline , or American Experience documentary on PBS to see what goes into a real production.

The error is believing that the software can empower one individual with the range of skills that used to belong to that collaborative team of professionals. With a solid version of QXP, FrameMaker, or InDesign, one skilled with the tool could have done the work more efficiently and less painfully.

The sample was created with QXP. Thanks to those who said kind words here about FrameMaker. Readers and intellects everywhere will benefit from their efforts in pulling all those ideas and materials together. It was ever thus. Cost of production is one ingredient.

Consider that Creative Cloud subscriptions can be monthly or annually, for one or multiple products and multiple users. The real conceptual failure in this software mess is the expectation that any sophisticated software product can imbue an individual with all the skills and experience that once were distributed among teams of individual specialists who collaborated on creating great publications, From reading the comments here, some of you are such polymaths, but may not be content authors.

So this emphasizes that the one option that was overlooked was that of collecting all of all of the content for this project, then hiring a book-production professional to put it together. As to masochism… Back in the day, one of the long-time technical writers on the early Internet FrameMaker comp. QuarkXPress 3. I had easily learned PageMaker 4. I only came back to learn it when I stumbled upon a job opportunity which required that dreaded software. I found an excellent book and played around with it on the Mac Classics at school, and slowly I became a convert as I found ways for QuarkXPress to run circles around PageMaker.

But then Adobe bought out Aldus and created InDesign from the ground up. After a shaky first version, it quickly rocked subsequent versions. Alas, QuarkXPress 4 did not. I was so terribly disappointed at how clunky it had become. For example, want to add a couple of points above a heading to better balance a page spread?

A small thing, but they add up. Good point. One important publishing system not mentioned is TeX by Donald Knuth. QuarkXPress can only run on Windows This includes new Mac users with the new OS pre-installed , technology enthusiasts who cannot wait to put their hands on the latest OS , and other users who have auto-update set on their mac. Please note that QuarkXPress — being a pure 64 Bit application — will not run under a bit flavor of Windows. We will not officially support QuarkXPress on Mojave, though it seems to run fine.

Please test yourself if you want to run this combination. Every program and driver in a Mac, as in Windows and Linux computers, is running on a C-powered kernel. Python is dynamically typed. Python leads to one conclusion: Python is better for beginners in terms of its easy-to-read code and simple syntax. Python is a free, open-source programming language that is available for everyone to use. It also has a huge and growing ecosystem with a variety of open-source packages and libraries.

If you would like to download and install Python on your computer you can do for free at python. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

With this StudioLink feature, Affinity Publisher users get this facility in place, right in the page documents, but using tools from other apps.

If you have Designer, you get the entire power of those apps directly within Publisher. There's no round-tripping, when you send an image out from, say, InDesign, to Photoshop to make changes, and then save it back. The ability, instead, to click one button and have your document be wrapped around with the entire feature-set of Affinity Photo or Designer, is more than convenient, it changes how you work.

Rather than making an adjustment in a separate app and hoping that it looks right when you bring it back into the publishing one, you can see every change and how it will appear, right as you do it. Adobe InDesign doesn't have this. Quark, though, has at least some in-place tools. QuarkXPress includes image editing features, filters and illustration tools. They're not as comprehensive as the ones in Adobe's Photoshop or Illustrator, and they're not as strong as the ones in Affinity Photo.

We can say what applies to most publishers and most of their needs, but that's little use if you happen to need more. While hopefully you can now see at least which couple of apps are worth trying for your specific situation, you need to go test them. That's easy enough with InDesign and Quark as there are free trial versions available for both.

There isn't a free trial for Affinity Publisher, though that may change as the company does offer trials for both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Even though there isn't a free trial of Affinity Publisher, however, we still recommend buying it if you're new to page design. There is a strong chance that it will be able to do all you need, and if you find that it can't, you'll have also found what specific features you really require.

And that will help you pick between InDesign and Quark. If, instead, you are a long-time page designer, buy Affinity Publisher anyway. Do it from artistic curiosity, do it from professional interest.

This app is new and it is cheap, compared to the alternatives, but it's also both powerful and actually absorbing to use. When it's your job to design pages, it's of course worth your time and the money looking into what works best for you. However, when this is what you do for a living, you also need to enjoy this tool that you spend your whole day using.

Quark, InDesign and Affinity Publisher may overlap in terms of features and capability, but they also have a rather different feel and that's not to be ignored. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos. The U. Department of Justice on Monday unsealed charges against two foreign nationals alleged to be part of the notorious REvil ransomware group that targeted Apple supplier Quanta earlier this year. Apple has joined the First Movers Coalition, an initiative by the U.

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