The Best Publishing Software
- Thread starter Fergie
- Start date
Permabanned
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- 26 Jan 2006
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- 145
Quark XPress 6.5 Passport 
£1,000+ Though
£1,000+ Though
Soldato
We use Quark at work but apparently Indesign is good too. If it's for professional stuff that you're going to send to a proper publisher then you really need to check what formats they can accept.
Associate
I used Quark for somewhere between 5 and 8 years (can't remember exactly) in the course of my job and I can tell you one thing - it is a crock of **** compared to InDesign.
Quark had a captive audience for years in the professional publishing market - a few die-hards used PageMaker, but the proportion was like comparing the number of Mac users to the number of Windows users.
My apprenticeship was in typography/print and in my experience, InDesign is just a superior product. I haven't used the very latest version of Quark, but it appeared to stagnate in terms of its feature set for years and when version 4 came out it was so buggy as to be practically unusable - something I never forgave them for.
You may find that a repro house may not be able to accept native ID files, but any that are serious about their service will be able to print from a hi-res PDF. We always use it for multi-page documents at work and have never had a problem with this sort of workflow.
Lastly, neither app is cheap but it certainly used to be the case that a copy of Quark was very nearly double the price of a copy of ID.
If you're looking for more modestly priced apps that need to produce documents to be professionally printed, then don't touch anything that doesn't export to PDF. In my experience, repro houses can be a little bit Luddite when it comes to new apps/file formats, but most good ones nowadays will print from a PDF and will happily advise on the export settings to use to work with their presses.
Quark had a captive audience for years in the professional publishing market - a few die-hards used PageMaker, but the proportion was like comparing the number of Mac users to the number of Windows users.
My apprenticeship was in typography/print and in my experience, InDesign is just a superior product. I haven't used the very latest version of Quark, but it appeared to stagnate in terms of its feature set for years and when version 4 came out it was so buggy as to be practically unusable - something I never forgave them for.
You may find that a repro house may not be able to accept native ID files, but any that are serious about their service will be able to print from a hi-res PDF. We always use it for multi-page documents at work and have never had a problem with this sort of workflow.
Lastly, neither app is cheap but it certainly used to be the case that a copy of Quark was very nearly double the price of a copy of ID.
If you're looking for more modestly priced apps that need to produce documents to be professionally printed, then don't touch anything that doesn't export to PDF. In my experience, repro houses can be a little bit Luddite when it comes to new apps/file formats, but most good ones nowadays will print from a PDF and will happily advise on the export settings to use to work with their presses.