Adobe In Design Vs. Quark Xpress

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 2003

In addition to inertia, Adobe has to fight economics. After a withering ad recession, few publishers are ready to plow big money into extensive capital projects. With the latest release of InDesign, both Adobe and Quark now require customers to upgrade to OS X.

On the other hand, Quark has given publishers another reason not to upgrade: Xpress 6 does not work with current versions of QPS and the upgrade of QPS that will (QPS Classic 3), won't be out until 2004.

Meanwhile, however, Quark's reputation for unresponsiveness and high prices opens up another front for Adobe. "It's no secret what most people think about Quark's support and customer service," says Dave Balderstone, director of production and creative services for Western Producer Publications, a book publisher in Saskatoon. "We decided to move to OS X two years ago, and there was no other option for page layout besides InDesign." Based on Quark's perennial product delays, he says, "I didn't believe there would be a really usable version of XPress for OS X for quite some time." He says the transition to InDesign has been fairly smooth.

On the pricing front, Quark has reached a new zenith of $945 per single-user copy of Xpress 6, up from around $800 in Xpress 5. And it has introduced a draconian new licensing scheme that bonds each copy of XPress to a single workstation. Single copies of InDesign CS can be had for just $699, while the entire Creative Suite Standard Edition retails for $999 - just $54 more than a single copy of XPress. In addition, a new version of InCopy, a package for editors ($259) has been completely rebuilt using the same composition engine as InDesign to make copy fitting more precise.

For all its improved features, the new Creative Suite has its failings, too. The widely despised activation scheme of XPress 6 has also been introduced with Adobe's CS products - although currently only for the Windows versions. More important, the greatest potential obstacle for magazine publishers is that no Adobe product directly compares with QPS. Even Australian Consolidated Press, Adobe's publishing poster child, with over 65 titles being produced on InDesign, hasn't found a suitable tool for managing its entire workflow. "A publishing system that works with InDesign, has content management, and the capability for flat planning is absolutely what we're missing," says Linda Harkin, project manager for ACP. "There are third-party products available that are probably fine for what most people are used to, but we'll have to do some of our own development to get what we want." Non - Adobe options include K4 from the German company SoftCare (marketed in the US by Managing Editor), Baseview Product's IQ, and PlanSystem from Van Gennep.

For all Adobe's bells and whistles, it has barely laid a glove on Quark in the magazine market. Some newspapers, including The New York Daily News, have adpted Adobe, but no major North American publisher is committed to using it, although various Time Inc. and Conde Nast magazines have evaluated it. (The issue is so sensitive at Time that when Folio: called for a comment, we were told "the lawyers" forbid art directors to talk about it.)