Quarkxpress, Very Much Alive But For How Much Longer
December 20th, 2007QuarkXPress, for so long the dominant force in the page layout arena, now finds itself fighting for survival and under attach by four products all created by Adobe, who look like achieving the same kind of dominance in the creative market that Microsoft have achieved in the general computing market.
The huge advantage that Adobe has in this battle of the DTP giants is that most users and potential users of QuarkXPress will also be users of one or more members of the Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. Every time the question of upgrades comes around, there will always be the option, for such users, of upgrading one of their Adobe products to the Adobe Creative Suite rather than just upgrading to the latest version of QuarkXPress.
Quark’s rather complacent attitude in the late nineties and early noughties contributed significantly to the shift from QuarkXPress to InDesign. For numerous years QuarkXPress dominated the market. It was the automatic choice for anyone creating publications which were to be professionally printed and there was more than a touch of complacency in their attitude. Upgrades were slow in coming and the product cost the earth.
Users of page layout programs look like being the main beneficiaries of the rivalry between InDesign and QuarkXPress. The release of upgrades to QuarkXPress has greatly accelerated in the last few years, with version 8 not far away and each release now bringing genuinely improved functionality.
Several of the new features in QuarkXPress 7 indicate that Quark are now fully awake to the threat posed by InDesign and are responding to it. QuarkXPress 7 allows the import of native Photoshop files (.psd) and has a special PSD Import palette containing options for manipulating imported Photoshop documents. Users can change the opacity and blend modes of the original Photoshop layers and work with alpha and spot colour channels.
So, what does the future hold for QuarXPress? Well, whilst it now appears that most design professionals see InDesign as the future of page layout, it’s important to remember that not all users of QuarkXPress are designers. A lot of corporations now buy QuarkXPress for producing in-house publications. So, in the future, we may see different flavours of the program emerging aimed at different types of user.
