I actually use both and my personal preference is for Quark mostly because most of the files I receive are Quark. But I think the trend is still towards Indesign. Basically I think Quark does the simple stuff better but in terms of support, upgrade price, plugins and the fact that Indesign is bundled with photoshop and illustrator I think i'm going to make the switch soon.

Anyone care to comment ...anyone who has made the switch actually regret it?

 

InDesign, especially CS3, also allows you to do things you might normally have done in Illustrator or Photoshop in the past. Not that I use InDesign extensively, but I am aware of the functionality.

I *do* use InDesign but my greatest expertise is in Quark.

(As for typesetting, I go back to IBM Selectric Composer days -- and have used Varietypers, too)

--Nance

I do not find the functionalities to InDesign and Quark XPress to be similar, but then, I haven't worked with Quark 7 at all. Or much with Quark 6, and certainly not with Quark 5. Because as far as I've ever been able to determine, the later versions contain all the bugs of Quark 4, plus new ones. Quark 4's bugs are at least well documented; with the new ones, you're on your own.

So that's a really big difference, right there: Adobe has been diligent about squashing bugs. I can't think of any that have carried over from one version to the next, and I've found very few to begin with.

The only features of XPress that I miss in InDesign are the ability to

1. edit kerning pairs
2. create H&J styles

The first is a pain to work around, but the second is not a big deal--just a glaring omission. These are far outweighed, for me, by many InDesign features that I use all the time: nested styles, object styles, table styles, Quick Apply, . . . As far as I know, Quark doesn't have any of these.

Quark XPress has its fans, obviously--thousands of them, I hear!--but my impression when using it has always been that it was built by people who never tested it for making a document more complex than a one-page ad. There are so many interface annoyances that make it tedious to work with, especially when you're setting a four-hundred-page textbook that uses, say, seventy style sheets. I have beat my head against my desk so many times while using that program, I've probably got a dent. But it's rare that I've rarely felt even mildly frustrated with InDesign, which I've been using since version 1.5.

Do clients still prefer Quark XPress? Not in my experience. The major publisher I worked for last year (designing book interiors, not typesetting) was still on Quark, but that had far more to do with their compositor's pricing than with the publisher's preference. Many of the designers wanted to switch, but the compositor was dragging its feet probably because it had invested tons of money into automating its copyfitting work in Quark. So they would accept InDesign layout samples, but they would reproduce them in Quark for the actual typesetting. Version 4, of course.

Some printers were balky about InDesign for a while, but I haven't encountered that since about 2003. I usually send PDFs, anyway, which printers tend to prefer.

In sum, I'm glad to be rid of XPress. I won't buy a copy of 7 for my company, even though we have a lot of legacy Quark files, because I think it's a waste of money. And the only reason I keep older versions around is to convert files down to 4 so that I can import them into InDesign. It's dead to me.

pat123, you started it, so I'll address you: You're in an unhappy marriage, forced to stay because of your little electronic children. It's not your preference, you're staying faithful to a happy memory.

Quark started fooling around on you in version 5, didn't it? With that ugly interface, stumbling home late at night. You hardly saw each other, except to convert files down from 6 to 4. Those strange new personality traits in version 6? Why did the scroll bar on the style sheet palette disappear? You'll never know. Just how many times do you have to throw out your preferences and restart to see the writing on the wall? You've lost enough of your life recovering work after Quark's sudden crashes, and now it's trying to win back your heart with version 7. Oh sure, Quark says it's changed, it's even better than before. But do you really have the time to wait around to find out how to work around Quark's new bugs? It's time to move on.