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Quark CEO Abruptly Resigns
stonydell writes "According to News.com, Quark CEO Kamar Aulakh is no longer with the company. Company spokesman Glen Turpin also said, 'We hope to find a new CEO as soon as possible. It's very important we bring in some professional outside leadership to the company.' Does Quark still have a future or is the future Adobe and Macromedia?"
Quark CEO eh...?
Maybe they're better off without him?
WTF is Quark?
Strange.
Quark doesn't have present, much less a future. They've been passed (and lapped a couple of times) by InDesign long ago. Their delays in keeping up with OS compatibility; their stubornly shipping software with keydisk floppies long after Apple stopped selling machines with floppy drives; they're not the only game in town and frankly, they're not the best game in town, so if they're gone, I for one won't miss them.
They blew it last time around. They had a wonderful product, but you can only screw your customers so many times before they start to get mad.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
I did when I was reading their website:
Paving the way for custom publishing in a multiple-channel environment with industry-leading design, page layout, publishing, enterprise workflow, personalization, and content management software.
--Greg
They still have a future, albeit it's winding down. There's still enough designers and print houses out there using Quark in their workflow that they'll be around for a bit more, but I can't see them growing any more.
Their biggest problem was not getting Quark to OS X fast enough. Quark used to be one of the killer apps for the Mac platform - Adobe got Photoshop there, but Quark took far too long, and Adobe got them with PageMaker/InDesign.
According to a friend who works at Quark (and is busy trying to find a more secure job), the dude's got testicular cancer. :o
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
yes, it's a dupe, I know. I had to.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I couldn't resist.
Adobe and Macromedia should help in the search. Has the FTC approved the Adobe's purchase of Macromedia? If Quark goes under or looks like it's gonna, the FTC is going to have a hard time approving Adobe's and Macromedia's merger.
"I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
that's awesome.
It's now my OGM.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Quark is as good as dead, and has been since InDesign 2.0 came out. Their customer service has always been terrible, they're more concerned about being hyper-vigilant about anyone violating their licensing than they are helping out paying customers. They were way too slow to release an OS X native version. The product itself has always been pretty solid and powerful, but they're still too tied to print output and haven't come along with the rest of the world on this whole internet medium thing.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Testicular cancer is one of those cancers that can be caught and treated successfully if found early. Unfortunately, it's not exactly one of those tests that you so willingly sign up for. You usually go in for examination when you notice some symptoms and by that point it's already too late. It's a lot like prostate cancer in that regard.
Good luck to this guy.
How rich was his parachute?
Publishing companies and newspapers switch over very very slowly ... You've got 50 year old lead designers who'd rather you cut off their arm before making them learn new software. I'm working at a newspaper with none other then Quark Xpress, and having used both indesign and pagemaker ... It's absolutely atrocious. I work bad hours as it is, but it consistently crashes once a week, invariably at 2:00 right before we should be heading out and the paper should be at the press. I'm pushing for a move to Scribus, though I doubt it's up to task yet, and I know GIMP is no where near photoshop (though I personally use it for everything, it's missing fundamental cmyk stuffs that make adobe a must-have ... though I have to hand it to Adobe, for a near monopoly they make damn fine products)
This company is rapidly heading to the dust bin, principally because of the way it treats it's customers. I remember a number of years ago a big hurricane hit Florida, totally destroying a Quark customers house and all his possessions. He called customer service to replace his REGISTERED copy of QuarkXpress. They told him that it wasn't their problem, to take it up with his insurance company. They said he would need to purchase a new copy. No thanks Quark, i'll stick with Adobe.
to hear that Quark was still around. It is not a name I have heard in about 5 years.
'Same speed C but faster'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The publishing house I work for - 37 consumer titles and a bunch of B-to-B - is in the process of migrating EVERYONE away from Quark and their workflow Publishing System to InDesign and k4. I don't think we were the first or the last. That's gotta hurt.
our migration is by no means solely "away from Quark": it's been good, but InDesign / K4 is apparently pretty compelling.
I know that seems like a huge stream of venom, but honestly, can anyone disagree? They're as bad as Commodore was in the late stages.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
it's a little off topic, but i've actually purchased
/// for my Apple ///, //e - as well as the //e.
Quark products...like 20 years ago.
I owned a copy of Word Juggler
and later had a version for the
Quark Catalyst desktop/file manager for the Apple
I hear they sorta went into the typesetting/ Desktop Publishing/ photo editing bees-nest once they shifted to Macintosh products - well, good luck widdat.
Not too many software companies can boast that they're still around after 20+ years.
And remember, their customer-hostile policies were directly driven by this ass of a CEO. He's the one that allegedly said "All customers are liars, thieves, and bastards" in an exec meeting. Everyone was screaming for an OS X version of Quark it took them how many years to come out with one? You can certainly make a point that Quark was the biggest obstructionist in OS X's adoption by keeping the publishing company on hold. Good riddance. Without this guy, maybe a Intel Mac version of Quark will be released in a reasonable time.
He's a quarky guy.
RTFA again for the best results.
Ain't that the truth...
/very very obscure
(paraphrased)
"Quark! Now there's a name I've not heard in a long, long time."
"So you know it?"
"Of course! They pushed me to InDesign through activation key madness"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
when our agency switched to indesign, i decided the best thing to do was to just deal with the pain of switching at once and get onboard. i haven't looked back since. there are some things that quark does well (some of the hotkeys are still better). but we were the first large-scale roll-out of indesign for a whole creative department and production studio. nearly every art director and production artist had sworn off quark altogether within a few months.
quark is this decades syquest. believe you can fleece your customers forever with unreasonably high prices, very little innovation and a big fat monopoly and it will bite you in the ass. quark used to cost more than the whole adobe creative suite (might still if i even cared enough to look it up).
Quark used to be full of cool people.
Then the Outsourcing Monkey came. And it weighed heavy on the back. And it was Not Good.
Now they are just a shell with progressively worse software being developed off-shore, and lunatics running the rest of the asylum. Indeed, we should all be alarmed that one has escaped to cause mischief elsewhere.
I work in digital color management, and Quark's CM is unusable. Well, not quite unusable, just horrible. We've never been able to figure out what it's doing with ICC profiles. The best you can do is let a RIP do it all and hope Quark doesn't do anything weird upstream.
Problem is, so many prepress houses have used Quark for so long, they're stuck with it until they get up the gumption to undergo what may be a painful migration to InDesign.
With all the delays in OS compatibility, the color management nightmare, and all the other problems that have been metioned elsewhere, I can't imagine using it. They act as if they hate their customers.
Back when Quark was "The Tim & Fred Show" it was obvious that Tim Gill was the heart and soul of Quark, and Fred was the looney that was the source of Quark's problems. I know Tim retired many years ago, and it seems the company's fortunes took a dive around that time.
I know they have had something of a musical chairs in the executive ranks for a while and Fred kept pulling stunts (like moving the company to Wyoming!)
I'm just thinking if Fred is still around then this guy had enough of Ebrahimi and bailed. I know when I was a large customer of Quark Inc. *I* had enough of Ebrahimi and I bailed.
You mean just Adobe, right? Did we forget?
Weak.
QuarkVsInDesign.com is an interesting site for desktop publishing professionals, run by one "Pariah S. Burke," that covers the rivalry between the programs. As you can see from the many comments on this March 29th thread, Quark : Postcards From the Edge, the animosity toward Quark has grown pervasive.
There have been many QuarkXPress Killers, InDesign among them, but QuarkXPress perseveres. It's a little bit like the Silicon Graphics of the software world.
The Grand Nagus will be displeased.
"Does Quark still have a future or is the future Adobe and Macromedia?"
If you have to ask that, then you know nothing about the design industry. Quark is a superior product to its competitors, it has features that far surpass the next best offering (Indesign). There are plugins for Quark and other products written for Quark which you won't find for Indesign as well, a lot of which are very important, so important its strange how Adobe havn't tackled them yet.
Indesign can't touch Quark for its pagination features alone. If you have a complex print job anybody with half an ounce of self respect for their time will use Quark. With Indesign you have to jump through hoops as do the printers, they hate it.
I recently had a print job, a 32 page booklet using Indesign, I didn't have Quark at hand and damn using it is a nightmare. I had to re-arrange all the pages into a print order myself (Quark does it for you) and it was lacking features with sending the job to the printer. I wouldn't touch it again after that, not unless somebody wrote some decent plugins for it in order to get up to the standard of Quarks features.
Macromedia doesn't have anything on Quark either, they don't have a competing product. You have to remember as well that Quark is an entrenched product, design companies are reluctant to move to something else just because its shiny and Adobe gets chanting about it.
Quark were staggering around after they released an OSX version of their software (what with its crappiness and product activation). But they have since turned around since there backs were up against the wall with Indesign (it being bundled in a suite with the most popular image manipulation program). They improved customer support and now offer a student version of their software when they didn't before.
Quark has a future and always will due to the shittyness that is Indesign, nothing out there comes close either to Indesign, never mind Quark.
Jonathanjk.com
maybe he's just going on a long drive to Whitecastle for a while...
A lot of people dis Quark becuase of that Mac issue. As if every corporation hasn't had an executive who spouted off something out of anger. I'm not defending him so much that I'm pointing out that he was under enough pressure that I think anyone would be frustrated. Even though OSX was a great thing for Apple, it created nightmares for thousands.
Quark in a lot of areas is better as a previous poster went into detail on. Adobe's commercial and educational prices have creeped up in the last couple years. Quarks has gone down. The InDesign XML hype isn't really that great. And Quark is definitely less bloated then Adobe stuff, even if the type doesn't look as good on screen.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
The only good Quarks are the one that owns the bar on a space station, and the one that captained a space garbage truck and had identical blonde twins (okay, one was a clone of the other one) as crew. Any other Quark with a capital Q is dead to me. Dead, I tell you.
I guess he got tired of Deep Space 9 and is going to open another bar in the gamma quadrant...
and what does Adobe... oh, you're talking of THAT quark
Sorry
Personally I think the CEO's resignation from head of Quark is an omen of much worse things to come for the company. When the head of the company resigns and jumps ship, it's usually a sign that the company is sinking fast.
Unless Quark acquires some brilliant new managment and turns out a revolutionary or innovative product, hopefully in time for Apple's x86 debute, I fear this is the end for Quark period.
It's a shame though, I grew up using QuarkExpress in school. I learned most of my desktop publishing skills from using QuarkExpress for the school pape. I'd hate to see the company go under, especially when they have the potential to create a great product.
But I'm not too sentimental that I won't move on if/when the death bell tolls for Quark. No matter how much we hate it, there is natural selection in the software world, and it tends to weed out the worst. Unless you can innovate (or purchase/clone/bash out of existence), you're doomed to the bargain bin.
unable to resolve function slashdot.sig(), aborting...
Franlkly, Quark lost when InDesign 2.0 came out. Since then, the upgrade path has widely been considred to be Quark 4 -> InDesign 2 -> InDesign CS . Quark 6 ? Yeah .... I heard they released that.
One of the biggest reasons for that is probably that Quark 4 -> Quark 6 and Quark 5 -> Quark 6 upgrades used to cost more than a new copy of InDesign. This, guys, is a really bad plan for keeping marketshare.
Quark's prices have plummeted, but even so all they really have going for them is that most designers are more familiar with Quark. Their technology is embarrassingly inferior in features, reliability, and pretty much everything else.
To top it off, Quark hasn't lost it's customer-hostile attitude to sales and support. Adobe will listen to you, and might even act on what you say. You don't get that from Quark. They pissed off a lot of customers while they had them locked in, and now those customers are jumping ship as fast as they can.
In short ... if I was the Quark CEO, I'd be looking for other work too. Unless the company pulls their head out in a hurry, I'd expect them to lose more than just their CEO.
Quark rarely does anything properly when it comes to platform support. Their first major release after OS/X came out just fixed the worst of the hacks so it ran OK under MacOS 9 emulation (Classic). They then charged another large upgrade fee to get one that ran natively... and I'd be shocked if that wasn't still chock full of MacToolbox calls and other elderly crud.
I find your comments very interesting. I'ts the first I've heard of really solid areas that Quark does things better, but I can see what you mean. I'll have to investigate those areas with the layout staff at work and see how they feel.
Quark's probably going to get replaced at work soon, because I just can't get it to do simple things right. The single biggest problem is it's handling of EPS and PDF. Save as EPS is buggy, and doesn't embed TrueType fonts even when told to. Placing PDFs on the page is a screaming nightmare - we now use Acrobat to convert them all to EPS instead. For my work, those are MAJOR problems.
I first reported the EPS problem to Quark not long after Quark 4.0 came out, and from what I hear it's still isn't fixed in Quark 6. Why haven't I checked? Because the last Quark demo I downloaded to test HAD SAVE AS EPS *DISABLED*. Yeah... way to let your customers test your software.
Frankly, even if InDesign has some serious issues, I'm inclned to jump ship just so I don't have to deal with Quark anymore. They've been arrogant and unpleasant to deal with, it's hard to buy their software in Australia without paying massive markups to exclusive distributors, and they just don't seem to care what their customers want. At least their prices have been forced down by Adobe, though.
Even if they wanted to, I think you'll find that Quark can't. Their app is really messy and not very portable - it was apparently a screaming nightmare just to port from MacOS 9 to MacOS X.
My understanding is that they'd have to rewrite quite a bit of it to do a proper Linux port. I guess they could port the win32 version using WINELib, though.
At this point, it doesn't matter much. Until Adobe ports Photoshop, nobody will care. If Adobe ports Photoshop, chances are they'll port Acrobat and InDesign instead. Why should Quark then try to contest a small market with a juggernaut already crammed into it?
There are also other options. I happen to work on one of them, Scribus. It's not that great right now and needs a LOT of work to bring it up to the required levels of features and reliability. It's already extremely useful, however, and it has some ass-kicking features including PDF export reliability that's right up there with InDesign.
Quark is gonna come back! Quark has great people working, with tremendous talent. But the problem with quark was/is that its been managed by a guy who knows best to run a construction. The management fail to create an ambiance which a product company should have - but the people in Quark try and do it. I guess they are trying hard - just hope that the dirty people at top make room for some one who knows about passionate product creators!
As someone who spent from 88-94 dealing with Xpress 5hrs+ a day, those pricks can't die fast enough to suit me. No - I take that back. I want them to suffer a slow, painful, humiliating death. Drag it out so that Macrodobe does get fat and arrogant too fast. Try calling their customer "service" and look forward to being trated like a criminal. Wait and wait and wait for an OS upgrade that isn't worth a crap. Pay for multiple film outputs because their color management blows chunks. If it weren't for the momentum they had with service bureaus and Pagemaker dropping the ball back around 1990, their customer base would have abandoned them ages ago.
Wow, way to kill a good joke. You suck.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I have been comparing both IndesignCS and Quark 6.5 for some time now. New packaging with 6.5 XTensions containing hoards of features beating Indesign by miles(May use, May not use is our decision)
What makes me wait is QPS 3.5. I am looking forward to having a competitor from Adobe for the QPS system.
The only thing that does not CHANGE is that "Change is inevitable"
With the newer customer reforms that Quark has been trying in recent future I see they are here to stay...
I can see Forums back on Quark Site http://www.quark.com/service/forums/.
Improved Customer Service and MUSIC:) I get answers to my queries, the last one was for improved Tables and there you go, I have got the better version for it already. Couldn't have expected this from Quark, but then it really takes less to try on a Toll Free number.
Discounts/discounts everywhere.
The most fulfilling part is Quark PRINTS, and with Indesign I can do a lot in Layout, but the net result is a big ??? May be Indesign can concentrate on Print then providing new features and adding bulk to the software.
The focus should be present and not the past. How many time have we thought who was wrong at the time of World War 2???
Hope we can open our eyes and see WHAT's NEW with Quark then beating around the bush...Get a new 6.5 upgrade download...
> If you have to ask that, then you know nothing about the design industry.
I've been in industry for ten years, I oversee editorial and design for 15 high quality print titles with paginations from 100 - 300 pages and you're talking bullshit.
There is no doubt which way the wind is blowing, and if you plan to be in this business in the next ten years, you'd better invest in Adobe.
I pray that Quark will finally release the source code, or at least sell it cheaply, of mTropolis, the multimedia tool that was rated as the best thing out there ever. That way it could finally get moved to modern platforms, such as WinXP, OSX and Linux. Quark, in Fred "The Iranian bastard" Ibrahimi's infinite wisdom, bought the product from mFactory, then spent about a year developing a new version but never doing any marketing or advertising whatsoever, and then killed the product outright, claiming that not enough people were buying it.
The stupid bastards then refused to release or sell the code at a decent price (They wanted over a milllion plus final control of any later product and a guarantee that user would no longer swear and curse at Quark in public for being the bunch of stupid greedy blind fuckups that they are). That situation never changed, and even though Quark finally got rid of Ibrahimi (may his soul burn in hell for all eternity, or better yet, may he have to answer user support calls in hell for all eternity), nothing has changed.
Quark is still just as dumb and stupid and greedy as they always were.
Parent really is insightful.
I used to be a hardcore Quark user and admin for many years (admined Quark the Quark Publshing System servers, all that workflow jazz). I liked the product. This was all about 5 years ago, just before version 4 came out.
but even back then the company really knew how to annoy their customers. They used to do fabulous stuff like issue point releases that couldn't write backwardly compatible files. Then they would stop selling the older point release.
The result? A department with 30 machines running Quark Xpress 3.5 quite happily would by an additional machine and find that only 3.6 was avaiilable now, and that the cost of updating 30 machines to 3.6 was
a) horrendous
b) Didn't actually give us any functionality that we wanted (it would be something daft like the ability to have gradient filled text or something.
People really really HATED Quark the company, it was quite an achievement to make your customer base loath you that much when the product was fairly solid. This was all before the OS X debacle.
Quark is a dying slug in the sun. They don't understand UniCode (that obscure technology that nobody has heard of), you must always make sure you never crash your computer, or need to reinstall your software. If you do need to reactivate shame on you. All computers are perfect and never have any problems, how can you say such things? Quark we love you, how can we survive without you. Sorry, I am back now after taking my medication, Die Quark, you lost. Adobe has one, and you lazy little shits in those print shops who bitch about your margins, upgrade to OSX, handle PDF's wake up and shape up, or a new digital pre press crew will send you screaming for your comforter. Use InDesign if you have any self respect I say!
Many investor groups today are questioning the scruples and abilities of today's CEO's.
Most are calling for Executive staff payscale reform directly tying their pay to the company profitability... if the company does not make a profit, then the Executive staff does not get paid.
such a change would significantly help companies cince over 48% of all expenses in salary and HR are to the executive staff.
Personally, I have yet to meet a CEO that is worth anything to the company, or is someone that is able to be a real leader and give real direction to the company while keeping the seperate departments focused on the objective.
A great example is what is happening with Comcast. Right now the HR department is running rampant trying to dictate IT rules as well as writing people up for "wrinkled pants" creating an atmosphere that is conductive to creating a labor union.
if the executive staff does not put the leash back on the HR department and or fire the morons that are doing the damage internally by acting in such a manner, then they will suffer greatly in the next 24 months. Behaivoir like this caused the hell that exists for Walmart, now they are trying to reform their Gestapo HR departments and managers while attempting to rebuild their image.
Posting ANON to keep from getting fired by the HR gestapo here.
For those who have no clue what Quark is or does (like me before reading this...)
Quark
--> QuarkXPress (their biggest product
..which was 50 bars of latiunum.
Quark has been spending time trying to make ONE solution for print and web and has been failing horrifically.
They should have kept their focus 100% on just the print end of things and they would be doing just fine.
Printers LOVE the fact that there isn't a new version of Quark every 18 months like with InDesign/Adobe.
* Pioneered 40+ alphanumeric registration code printed as a single block in highly condensed type. No, it's not a big thing, but a great introduction to their general attitude.
* When the Mac moved from 68k to the PowerPC chip, companies started producing fat binaries of programs that worked on both kinds of machines. ALL of the major Mac companies did this... except Quark, which released a separately priced PPC-alone version.
* In 2002 then-head of Quark Fred Ebrahimi said at a Quark "executive summary" that "the Macintosh platform is shrinking" and anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should "switch to something else" although moving to InDesign would be "suicide."
* Dragged their feet on an OS X version until Steve Jobs could joke about "holdouts" and everybody knew who he was talking about. They were dead last transitioning to OS X, and the 6.0 upgrade had nothing new from 5 other than OS X compatibility.
* Killed their own user-to-user forum around the time of the 6 release (it's back now)
* If you run a small LAN and can't afford site licensing, you'll love Quark 6's paranoid active registration. Beyond the arcane installation, the rights are for a single machine, not single user! The registration is hardware-specific: if your hard drive crashes, or if you clone your system to a new drive, you have to reactivate the software. For our group, using automated activation didn't work for three of five upgrades, and I wound up on the phone begging Bangalore for activation numbers. I now slate an hour of frustration for each upgrade or reinstall of this program.
* Quark 6 still doesn't play nice with PDFs. PDFs are now the industry standard, but we've experienced various strangeness in Quark's direct PDF output and can't trust it for high-end jobs.
So why are people still using it? In our case, backlog of files. We have InDesign CS and are using it for new work and pickups. Quark would be in the dumpster except for old jobs. Going back now because they might mend their ways? Too little, too late.
My boss knows my long-time disgust with Microsoft, and once asked which I hated more, Microsoft or Quark? It stopped me cold, and I finally just had to say "Yes."
in other news: quark is still around and in business.
who knew?
of course, people said the same thing of apple not too long back: several years of floundering, nosediving market share, awful products, and a byzantine attitude towards customers, support and pricing. oh, and a revolving door on the CxO suite.
maybe steve jobs is looking for another challenge?
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
.. if the company does not make a profit, then the Executive staff does not get paid.
Thereby forcing an even stronger focus on quarterly profits at the expense of long-term strategic planning - 'If I don't make my profit target, I won't get paid, so I better cut costs by firing people and doing more outsourcing - future be damned!'
I agree, tho, that the rest of your comments are right on target.
I once was head of MIS for a consortium of companies in Baltimore. The MIS department shared facilities with the telemarketing company. After the telemarketing company president resigned, it took two and a half months for the board to find a replacement - meanwhile, the company was completely headless. It was a small company of less than 50, with no other management besides an accountant and two senior telemarketiers. The employees started coming to work in jeans, shorts and t-shirts! Our consortium was mostly a banking company so this was 'unthinkable'. They were literally having parties in the office almost every day. On their own initiative, the employees instituted flex-time and other shocking innovations. But they were still working.
I was generating the sales reports for their company - profits for the telemarketing company increased by over 40% for this period!
It all came to an end when the wife of the chairman paid a visit and saw the 'chaos'. I recommended that they do nothing about it, given the profit numbers, but I was laughed at (of course). The board's reasoning: Think how much better profits will be once they get strong management again!
Strong management was hired, and profits quickly sank to their normal levels. The board was predictably mystified by this development.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
It's been done.
Don Hosek did the first couple of issues of his magazine, _Serif_ using TeX a while back.
The nascent _Free Software Magazine_ is done using LaTeX.
That said, it's important to remember that the limiting factor in TeX usage is human ingenuity (and to a lesser extent available computer processing power --- though pages generate almost instantly for all but the most computationally intensive layouts these days, not like the _minutes_ or even hours it used to take)--- it's a Turing compleat programming language, so it can do anything once one figures out how to explain to TeX how to do it. DH often likened using TeX to playing Chess, requiring an awareness of what would be happening in the future. There has been some interesting work done on expanding this sort of thing though.
By contrast, the limitations of using Quark XPress and InDesign are available manpower/time and computer equipment. One can do anything, but not much can be automated ``merely'' using stylesheets and graphic placement rules. Numbering often is done by hand, (re)generating an index can be especially tedious, cross-references are primitive at best, and equations &c. require special proprietary plug-ins.
FWIW, people who're using InDesign are using TeX to a certain degree --- Adobe licensed URW's HZ hyphenation & justification algorithm which was based on TeX's. Turning things around, pdftex now affords many of Adobe InDesign's H&J features including hanging punctuation and character expansion.
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase
affords some interesting examples of what TeX can do.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Imagine the F, followed by a "grave" accent ("\") over the capital letter I, followed by a capital letter I diminished to fit the grave accent above it...
Together, these letters appear to form a capital "A".
Now add the remaining letters of the CD title.
The number of jokes in the Typesetting-pr0n classification of modern humour is growing every day.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I used to think my own experience was from the POV of a smaller shop, and that I'd maybe "get" the Quark mindset if I was producing catalogs for Marshall Fields or something... but judging by the market, no.
The stark contrast with Jobs, speaking of him, is instructive. When Steve stepped on stage and talked about what the P2P scene was like for users, it was completely clear to me as a user that he did really understand that experience. iTunes was made to hit a sweet spot that got at all the frustrations in P2P. Generalissimo Jobs has the whole cult of personality thing going on, but he's a control freak who genuinely seems to "get" the way the user perceives things. "Insanely great" and all that.
Quark has more in common with the RIAA's vision of its market. So, the user is a potential criminal who needs to be kept in line. And so on.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Adobe and Marcomedia are now one and the same. Sad, but true.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
When the CEO states that users should simply switch to Windows to update to the latest version, you know that things are way bad! That comment actually made a switcher... to InDesign. I still have a copy (4.1) which resides in classic for opening old files, but I will never upgrade the four licenses that I own.
InDesign actually takes longer to produce designs, but has better controls. It also works well with PDF, which in publishing is taking over in the workflow to press.
I think kinko's still uses quark express, and if this is the case this is definately a large industrial user base of this software. I think quark are here to stay.
iirc, they laid off all of their US staff, outsourced most everything to India, and immediately took a huge delay on the Mac OS X version.
Meanwhile, what were basically 1st year Objective C questions from Quark 'developers' started showing up on mailing lists.
Adobe has been killing them with Indesign. I knew a lot of Mac users that couldn't upgrade to OS X (and sometimes, new hardware) because of Quark's feet dragging and horrible product delays.
I'm surprised that they're still around and nobody has bought them up. Maybe the existing Mac OS 9.x versions are keeping them alive with expensive support calls. (Ever called them?)
Die, Quark.
Sure, you've got a list of things that are important to you, but for workflow and 90% of things you need to do with a document, InDesign wipes the floor with Quark. Even having to go through the learning curve for InDesign, I found I can work about twice as fast.
You're probably the only one in history who thinks Quark is "on your side and more forgiving."
i'd have to say, as a designer, Quark seriously dropped the ball by not releasing quark 6 (well, without retracting the release, that is) before InDesign came out. once InDesign got a foothold on the market, a lot of quark die-hards began to understand that quark is difficult to use for no particualr reason. for those interested in workflow optimization, indesign is the better choice. it's far more stable, and there's been much more development behind it than quark. like i said, quark dropped the ball, and now they're suffering the consequences.
Depends. How many modules did the CEO maintain?
Butt Fucking
Back Packing
Ass Sex
Going down the Hershey Highway
Sodomy
Rump Loving
Gape Making
Tater Hole Stuffing
Shit Packing
Man-Pussy Fucking
Salad Stuffing
Butternutt Bread Baking
Colon Cleaning
Rectum Rooting
Cleaning out the pipes
Rear Entry
Coming in the Back Door
Entering the Exit
In the number 2
Going Brown
Gouging the Brown Eye
Gouging the Winker
Booty Love
Of course, the last time Adobe bought a company that owned Freehand, Adobe was forced to sell it to another company. There is still some hope that this will happen again, but the Bush DOJ is, I think, less likely to care than the Clinton DOJ.
Write Only Memory: Another pointless blog.
i'm an adjunct at a large state college, and our art department dropped quark two years ago. there's a bunch of folks graduating that have never seen quark, or, if they have, only in comparison to indesign (ie, 'yeah i can do that in freehand, it's just like how i do it in illustrator').
i really think that when the future production artists rebel against quark, quark's future is gone. sure, they'll work in some shops that'll require it, but they'll push back and demand xml and png compatibility, which quark can't touch.
You aren't kidding about that stuff. Where I work, their stupid activation wouldn't go through our firewall, and I'll be damned if I'm punching a hole in it for their "mother may I" crap.
So we learned about the "Quark License Administrator" server software.
I installed it on an XServe, and got a Quark License Administrator License File for it, generated off their website by using the 53-character alphanumeric key (which was WRONG, and I had to spend two days talking to Habib in Bengladesh to get another one). Other information their website requires for you to get this thing running:
administrator email address
IP address / port number
DNS name of server
MAC address of ethernet adapter in server (WTF?!)
If any of this information changes, the QLA server breaks, and no one can use Quark. NIC fails and you replace it? Breaks. Move to a different subnet? Breaks. DNS or domain change? Broken.
I was also curious as to why their god damn JAVA applet was using 25% of my XServe's total CPU capacity, and when I called about that, first I was hung up on by their crap phone tree. Next call, I got to wait on hold for 25 minutes to be told that "oh yeah, we know about that, and the next version will fix it." However, they don't put QLA downloads on the website, so I need to order a CD for a 6MB program.
What a god damn joke. Quark has lost 100+ sales of their software due to pissing me off, and Adobe has gained 100+ sales.
Screw QuarkXPress, and screw Quark.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I'm sure that someone's already pointed this out , but Adobe announced their intent to purchase MM back in April - http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobe andmacromedia.html
I share an office with a graphic designer with a very long and deep background in Quark. I have had to help her deal with Xpress' bad behavior for some time. When I read the article, I told her, excitedly, "The CEO of Quark abruptly quit!" "Just like Quark," she quipped.
I work for a very large newspaper owned by the Tribune. Our ad builders who create ads in-house, or generate pickups still rely on Quark heavily. Sure, we have InDesign CS2 in here as well, but it all depends on what formats agencies send us. Sometimes Quark is a great alternative to InDesign when it comes to creating a simple EPS. Anyway, I feel Quark will be in the runnings for a little while longer, but InDesign will eat it up eventually :)
P.S. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
I hate hate hate Quark, but love love love the developers out there. I worked for Quark! Quark has done alot bad to fresh graduates out of college. They promised them to give a job and then asked then fired them after 1 month! Kumar runs Quark as a construction house. But but but the people - software creators over here are so pure... i hate quark!!!
Quark had the most unintuitive, customer-hostile installation and registration process of any software company I've ever used. Good riddance, I use InDesign now, and have for a few years.
Open source Quark 6! Why not? They are never going to go anywhere with their current attitude and framework, but they still have a ton of the market, and a lot of people who would be interested in a) not learning InDesign and b) beating the crap out of an equally stupid company, "Macrodobe."
The situation is already as dire as Netscape's was, except the lock-in on page layout programs is far more dramatic than browsers. Make the right moves, and you would have an Apache for the layout world.
Tim is a homo but cool ! Fred was a dick ! Kumar is a dick ! Debra is a cunt ! That corp mouthpiece Glen Twirpin is a bigger dick, he had to approve what we said in sales presentions. Let's see Suzie Freedman fucked Fred to the top, is that enough ... ha ha ha die Quark no one will miss you...
Quark doesn't have present, much less a future. They've been passed (and lapped a couple of times) by InDesign long ago. Their delays in keeping up with OS compatibility; their stubornly shipping software with keydisk floppies long after Apple stopped selling machines with floppy drives; they're not the only game in town and frankly, they're not the best game in town, so if they're gone, I for one won't miss them.
Yeap, Quark really lost it when they delayed XPress for Mac OSX.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Are you serious? Who types like that? The only think you got right is that Quark is crappy, crappy like WW2...
,
faeryman
They are the worst company in this world to deal with, based upon numerous interactions with them. Here's one example, I ordered a copy of Quark, received one for the wrong OS, tried to return the still sealed copy and they wouldn't authorize the return! And I was an authorized Quark dealer.
I'd rather buy software from Microsoft, and I'm a Mac fan. I'm generally a nice guy but I hope they get what they deserve. Let em rot.
Ventura Publisher does things that Quark simply can't do, even with literally $10,000 worth of plug-ins. Things like single multi-column tables that span hundreds of pages with page header text that crosses the columns.