Talk:QuarkXPress

Criticism of History section of article
This article is about the product, QuarkXPress, not the company; nevertheless, the history section is more about the company than the product. Moreover, whether or not this section is meant to be so, it strikes me as a subtle bit of negative advertising: taken together with the section in the introduction concerning Adobe InDesign, I think it is inappropriate. If I were to remove all benefit of the doubt towards the motive behind this section, I would accuse it of trying to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) concerning QuarkXPress, and the company, in an effort to sway customers towards Adobe's product.

I strongly suggest that this be edited to present the history of the product in an indisputably neutral manner. mariox19 20:21, 16 August 2006 (UTC) mariox19 2006.08.16 at 20:20 GMT.


 * Turns out that text was a copyvio from . It's been removed. Clappingsimon talk 22:05, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Company History
What brothers me is that I do not see Tim Gill's name anywhere. A Quark history without mentioning Tim Gill is silly and incomplete. Michael Yearsley

Michael Cassidy michael_cassidy@condenast.com


 * This is the WP entry on QuarkXPress the application. Not the history of the company. Items like "(among) professional page designers, the typesetting industry and printers ... the Mac version of 3.3 (released in 1996) was seen as stable and trouble-free" resonates with me: in the book industry in the 1990s, companies would select a version that reliably performed the functions they needed done. We needed quick turn around on book and quarterly journals. Relearning "improved" versions or debugging new packages was a problem. Backward compatibility of files was important (like when one did a revision of a book printed a few years back). THAT kind of thing is important in a history of the application.
 * In fact, what I find bothering is no mention of Quark XPress tagged text format: this export/import feature allowed me to move projects between QuarkXPress, Ventura Publisher and PSI Penta systems, and as our mainframe composition system was shut down allowed me to translate tags and character coding to import into XPress. To me the Quark XPress tagged text is a great feature of the application, but is not mentioned in the article on the application. Naaman Brown (talk) 11:38, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Neutral POV
pasted from article space

The wording in this article, especially the features section, feels like Quark PR, and is not up to the standard of impartiality that is and should be demanded of a proper Wikipedia entry. For example, states that "for a period in the late 1990s, new versions were slow to be released", but it doesn't say how slow (1996 for version 4.1, 2003 for version 5). The article asserts that QuarkXPress is the dominant page layout program, but this has not been true for some time: Adobe InDesign outsold QuarkXPress as early as 2002. Current estimates give Adobe InDesign a slight lead over Quark in terms of use by the publishing industry (a little over 50%). The statement that Quark is a "drag-and-drop" program is not entirely accurate, either. Text and objects already placed in the document can be moved around with the mouse, however Quark does not allow you to drag text and graphics from other programs; images must be placed, and text must be imported or copied-and-pasted into the document.

"Version 6.5, released at the end of 2004, surprisingly took the lead in support for the Photoshop format (PSD) and positioned QuarkXPress as the only layout tool with true integrated image editing capabilities."

This statement is vague, biased, and at least partly false. The article says that Quark "took the lead" by introducing PSD support. Took the lead from who? InDesign offered PSD support long before Quark did. Quark did not offer proper support (i.e. recognizing layers) for PSD files until version 7.

The article also downplays the considerable anger generated over the years among Quark users by the company's poor track record of supporting its software, and the controversy caused by the (former) CEO's comments alienating Quark users (eg. Quark users are "committing suicide" by switching to InDesign). The article also neglects to mention customer complaints about Quark's lack of features and slow updates, in comparison to its chief rival, InDesign. Lastly, the article doesn't mention complaints about Quark's lack of support for things like OpenType fonts, image transparency and drop shadows (prior to version 7) in comparison to InDesign, which has supported such features for several versions now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Www.teamhcn.com (talk • contribs)


 * Discussion needs to be posted on the talk page not in the article. This article is not the place to state without citation that InDesign is a superior product. Feel free to write a new article that compares the two products. Please provide a citation to the things you are stating as facts above. If you have a verifiable source for market share of the two products, that can be included. Sales and installed base are different matters, due to the leapfrog nature of software releases at some point in time one or the other products will always be outselling the other. It is likely that quark will pull ahead of indesign at some point - you really need figures for the period since version 7 was released. The release dates of the software versions are included in the article; the dates were included in the 'slow' section but were removed as they were repetitious and not a reflection of what is happening currently. BTW you state "1996 for version 4.1, 2003 for version 5" but the article has 1997 for 4.1 and 2002 for 5. The article actually says that Quark was dominant in the professional field not in total sales, they are different things. I'm sure that Quark has never been the most popular layout package in total DTP packages sold. Provide a cited source showing that in total slightly more than 50% of professionals use indesign and change the text. Not so sure pointing out the lack of features which are now included in the package adds anything much to the article. As to the quoted text above, I didn't write it, but always took it to mean that PSD editing, which you would expect to be easiest in an Adobe product, was equally easy in Quark. Do agree that it reads like it's actually easier in Quark, but you'd need a source to show which is true. I presumed it was taken from the citation for the Macworld Editors award. Cheers Clappingsimon talk 08:20, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
 * The Macworld editors award is here. The award was given for Quark's ease in editing PSD images. Clappingsimon talk 08:43, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Quark/InDesign Usage
I am an employee in the prepress department of a large printing company, and we print for several people and companies, from everyday people to world-wide corporations. Granted, we are just one company, so what I say may not matter much, but about 70% of the art we receive to print is now in InDesign. The rest is either raw Photoshop or Illustrator files, a few Pagemaker or Freehand files, or Quark files (perhaps between 15%-18%). Most of those are Quark 4 or Quark 6 files. Very few files have come in Quark 7. It doesn't seem like many people are using it yet, at least among the companies and designers that we deal with. Most of the designers are using InDesign, now, by a large percentage. However, from what I have heard and learned about various printing companies, many of them (the printers) still prefer Quark Xpress. I don't know how many of the files that they receive are Quark as opposed to InDesign, though. So, I suppose it really depends on what group of people you are talking about: designers, printers, and so on. As I said, I am part of just one company, but I am in the target industry, both as a designer and prepressman/printer. KevinStuart 22:08 MDT, 2 October 2006
 * Not sure where you're based, but I'm in Nashville, and we just sent a job to a printer and they had to buy Quark 7 just to run the job. Does not bode well for Quark. EVula 05:34, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

I also work in the prepress department of a printing company, printing for customers in Europe as well as the US. I use Quark, InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator daily to process files sent to us by designers from many locations. I find Quark to be clumsy and troublesome, giving me fits with that bane of prepress: "fonts." InDesign, on the other hand, has a smooth, almost intuitive workflow. The people who stubbornly cling to Quark "because that's what we've always used" should give InDesign a try. I believe most would switch asap! If Quark had made their customer service more responsive, cleaned up their workflow and lowered their prices sooner, they would probably still be on top. Oh well, we do what we can.GeorgeHB (talk) 03:15, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Version History
Do we really need a Version History section showing every release? I would think the most notable bits could be worked into the History section as a narrative. -- Hawaiian717 15:33, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Personally, I like these things. There is a tendency for software articles to talk about the product, now, today - the stuff you can get from the official web site - rather than good encyclopedic stuff and history, hard to find elsewhere (and equally hard to source) Notinasnaid 15:45, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * But, is it really encyclopedic that version 7.1 came out in 2007? All we say about it is that it was a performance update.  That doesn't seem very notable to me. -- Hawaiian717 16:15, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The fact that it doesn't add anything else may well be relevant to someone, in the future, trying to figure out what they have, or don't have, in terms of features. I don't see any benefit to removing this stuff (though benefit in sourcing it, which will indeed produce an enormous references section). "Performance update only" might focus it better to emphasise the lack of functionality.Notinasnaid 08:58, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * On reflection: the test for "is this recent update to be included" should probably be "Would this be included if it had happened ten years ago". This should be true of the entire article; software articles tend to become something like readme files. Notinasnaid 09:09, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think that's a reasonable test for a lot of things. There seems to be a tendency to want to get the very latest bit of information on something into an article, when really we ought to step back and see if it really matters (not just with software articles either -- perhaps "Wikipedia is not a changelog" should be added to WP:UNENC).  An equal variation on your suggested test is "In ten years, would anyone care?"  I don't have a stake in this article; I just saw the story on the new version on Macworld and came to check and update the article if nobody else had done it, and when I saw the version history list thought it was a bit much, so I brought it up for discussion here. -- Hawaiian717 15:00, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

It would also be nice if there were prices listed of how much the different version cost then. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.56.64.138 (talk) 14:24, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Differences in versions
What are the differences in QuarkXPress "American English", "International English", and "Passport"? is Passport a lite or trial version? RingtailedFox • Talk • Stalk 17:16, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Fox. The American English version is just that. It has spelling and hyphenation for the American version of the English language. The International English version is more like British English and Australian English and will mark "theater" as wrong, suggesting the spelling of "theatre" instead. The Passport edition has spell checking and hyphenation for more than a dozen languages, including the above two, and is a sight more expensive.

I made some changes to the opening paragraphs -- I hope that reads better. Thanks for pointing out how that is unclear. - Robert Rapplean 02:07, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Version 8
Version 8 is out now. Article should be updated. Misha (talk) 18:24, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Preflight
"QuarkXPress also allows the ability to pre-flight a document. It works within the layout application itself and allows the user to jump directly to the conflicting object. Since then Adobe has implemented a similar feature in InDesign CS4" false statment. I work with Indesign CS3 and preflight is also implemented and works smooth in this version. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.222.110.135 (talk) 23:56, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

External links modified
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Market share
The market share of QuarkXPress during the 1990s is referenced, but the present share is unmentioned, though it should be. Nicmart (talk) 14:27, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

QurkXpress 1
I would like to submit photos of QX1 manual, discs and Mac SE (for posterity) but I'm unsure about copyright. Could somebody advise me? Also (I'm new), I always have trouble signing-in. 149.86.91.53 (talk) 18:11, 23 April 2021 (UTC)