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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?"
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.
Indesign will let you delete all styles in use without complaint. Quark will
warn you that a style you're are trying to delete is in use.
There is no kerning table edit. This is very important to me as in some
fonts certain things like an f followed by a i grave can be a problem.
Optical kerning is not a substitute. I want to control this myself. In
any case, Optical Kerning can't be applied in advance to specific
characters. It would be a search and replace option.
Importing text from Word seems fine until you apply a style to a portion
of text. All page-breaks will disappear. You can't search for
page-breaks or use the Find and Replace to insert page-breaks. This is a
major irritation.
It doesn't make automatic backup files. This can be very important if
you want to go back. I try to remember to make manual backups in
InDesign, but it's just one more thing to remember.
Using a discretionary hyphen can be a nightmare (in version 2.02 at
least). First, hyphenation has to be switched on in the paragraph, so it
will hyphenate the whole paragraph. To avoid this (I'm often working in
Gaelic) I have to make the whole paragraph No Language. If I then type
an apostrophe it comes out as non-smart. Has this been fixed in the CS
version? In Quark I just use the discretionary hyphen, end of story.
En-dashes are breaking always. The only way to make them non-breaking is
to use the No Break option. Date ranges must have a non-breaking en
dash. There should be one available, and this should be the default in
imported text. However, the No Break option is useful in other
circumstance, so it is a Good Thing.
In Quark you can globally change the H&J parameter if you want. In
InDesign you have to do it style by style.
The general feel of InDesign for me is that it is full of tricks and
very full of itself and it is up to me to keep up and pay attention or
it is going to catch me out. I feel Quark is on my side and is more
forgiving. For instance, if you want to change a style, in Quark there
is no chance of applying it by accident because you would be in the Edit
Style sheets menu.
Obviously there are things I really like about InDesign, notably the
paragraph composer, and the extensive Find capabilities, such a
searching for a colour, but generally I still feel more comfortable in
Quark, although almost everything I do is now in InDesign because of
Opentype fonts. I haven't upgraded Quark from 4.1 but I am seriously
considering going back on this next version. It seems I am alone in the
universe if this newsgroup is anything to go by, but yes, I do like
Quark. I feel there's a solidity to it. But then I don't print
transparency or gradients. I'm a plain text and normal graphics and
maps person. And I don't really mind not importing photoshop files
direct.
You usually go in for examination when you notice some symptoms and by that point it's already too late.
Yes, people: DO NOT IGNORE IRREGULARITIES IN YOUR NUTS. If you feel pain or growth, go to a doctor. You can be embarassed or you can be dead. Your choice. If you find out early enough, it's no big deal. If you find out mid range, it can plague you for the rest of your live (via relapse), if you find out too late, you're dead. The difference between early and too late can be as little as two to six months.
20-35 year olds be especially vigilant.
to hear that Quark was still around.
That's quite an understatement. In the press/print world Quark is still everywhere.
Sorry, you are thinking of Fred Ebrahimi, who left in February 2004 to tend macadamia nuts in Hawaii. He co-founded Quark with Tim Gill. If memory serves, he made the famous remark at MacWorld, where there are usually some, uh, customers lurking about.
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.
The PPC chips have always had FPUs - and powerful ones. What the PowerPC chips never had was emulation of the 68k FPU - Apple's emulation was of the 68LC040. There was an extension (SoftFPU, IIRC), which added 68k FPU emulation, but Apple never included it in a shipping machine - probably to 'encourage' programmers to port their code to PPC.
As for Fred moving the company to Wyoming - wrong. He moved it to a little corner of India that was Kamar's hometown - Mohali, near Chandigahr.
Quark's new home is low-tech, even by local standards... and a hard place to convince good programmers to relocate to... when there are better jobs and opportunities in Bangalore, Mumbai, etc.
Like, for example ...?
[...] I had to re-arrange all the pages into a print order myself (Quark does it for you)[...]
LOL. No, InDesign doesn't have an imposer built in. Get a plugin like InBooklet. For soemeone who brags about knowing "the design industry" you are not well informed. And quick, tell me: Why is the company who makes InBooklet, producing imposing software for QuarkXpress as well?
For those who have no clue what Quark is or does (like me before reading this...)
Quark
--> QuarkXPress (their biggest product
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.
If the first two letters of "FINAL" are too closely spaced, they could appear to be a boxy-looking "A".
"FINAL FANTASY" ~= s/FI/A/