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?"

Comments

Quark CEO Resigns?

[Neil Blender]

Strange.

Future?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Future?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Future?

[poopdeville]

Christ on a cracker, I'm so glad I use TeX instead of any of these things.

Re:Future?

[mkro]

This is very important to me as in some fonts certain things like an f followed by a i grave can be a problem.

So true. A female colleague of mine found out the hard way when she was demonstrating a client's cd labeling software on the big screen.

The cd label said "FINAL FANTASY", but only until she selected a bolder typeface.

Maybe he had a brain hemorrhage

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Lack of charm

[Greg Hullender]

It seems he lacked enough charm to come out on top.

--Greg

Re:Lack of charm

[Anonymous Crowhead]

If that's how you want to spin it...

Re:Lack of charm

[Owndapan]

Well his tenure was not without its ups and downs.

sudden resignation - the reason

[larry bagina]

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

Re:sudden resignation - the reason

[Neil Blender]

If this is true (or even if it isn't), why the hell would you broadcast that to the planet? I'm sure he wants to keep this discreet. It's nobody else's business.

Maybe he wanted to announce it while he still had the balls&&&&SAD_#()%#$^^^^[STRUCK BY LIGHTENING NO CARRIER]

Re:Slow. . .

[EggyToast]

Yep, exactly. They had a near-monopoly on desktop publishing on OS9. Then Quark 5 comes out, late, buggy as hell, and... for OS9... well after OS X has been out (I think it came out right when 10.2 hit, which is when OS X started to pick up steam). Why release a new product ONLY on an old OS? It's like releasing an app that ONLY works on Win 98 right when Win2k comes out!

Then it takes them forever to release an OS X version, Quark 6. Which, while at least as stable as Quark 4, shows little real improvements. No attempts to incorporate new technology, little admission that there are new and often better formats for saving and exporting data.

InDesign comes out from the burnt remains of PageMaker as an OS X only application, and people start looking at it seriously. They really push it forward with the "CS" version, and it's really a solid product at that time. Now CS2 is out, with very solid XML support and just all around improvements. It's really drastically replacing desktop publishing applications.

I work with hundreds of different non-profit journals in my work, and we've seen an extremely drastic shift to InDesign. Even WE are moving to InDesign, for exporting documents to XML. InDesign accepts more formats, works with documents from those formats easier, and exports to such a variety that it's really become a great application.

Quark really blew it.

Re:Question

[arbitraryaardvark]

Quark is the proprietor of Quark's. RTFA?
With Quark out of the way, his brother Rom can take over.
http://www.dmwright.com/html/ferengi.htm
rules of acquisition

Why I hate Quark

[efudddd]

Like many others in graphics, I loved the program Quark in the old days (say, version 3.32 up to 4.1.1) but loathed the company. Nowadays there's no need to make any distinction, since 6 is such a non-starter. There are so many reasons to actively despise the company, all revolving around their contempt for their users. Some of my faves:

* 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."