InDesign chips away at Quark's
graphics leadership
by Alan Zisman (c)
2002
First published in Business in
Vancouver
, Issue #656 May 21-27, 2002 High Tech Office column
With its newly updated page design program InDesign
2.0, is trying
to snatch users away from long-time leader Quark XPress (see
last week's column ).
Quark, however, is trying to maintain its market share
with its long-awaited new version 5.0 (about $1,500, or
$450-600 for
upgrades from earlier XPress versions).
On paper, the two products have a lot of
similarities. They are sold in Mac and Windows versions, add
long-needed tools for working with tables
and layers and enable users to design for both print publication and
the
Web.
Mac users looking to migrate to OS X will be
disappointed that,
unlike Adobe's new product, the new XPress lacks native support for
Apple's
new operating system. XPress 5 will run under OS X, but more slowly
than
under the older OS 9. Quark promises the next version will run directly
under
OS X, whenever that might be released.
Quark's new Web-design tools are more comprehensive
than InDesign's.
But where InDesign allows users to create a single design and export
both
print and Web versions, XPress projects must be dedicated to a single
use.
Text and graphics from a print project have to be awkwardly copied and
pasted
to a separate Web-focused project.
XPress's type tools are little changed from previous
versions, and have been surpassed by InDesign's new features. XPress's
user interface, too, offers little change, though this will be a relief
to users who have learned on earlier versions. InDesign supports
multiple languages within a
single document. Quark only offers this to purchasers of their much
more expensive
Quark XPress Passport version.
InDesign also gets the nod for graphics support.
Unlike XPress,
it can work with native Photoshop and Illustrator files, perhaps no
surprise
given their common Adobe heritage. Graphics-heavy documents, either
saved
or exported to Acrobat format, produce significantly slimmer file sizes
in
InDesign as well.
Many owners of previous XPress versions expanded the
program's
capabilities with extra-cost add-in extensions. Some of those features
are
now built-into the new version, but owners who have invested heavily in
third-party
extensions should check whether they will work with the new version.
While
InDesign offers built-in support for Adobe's popular Acrobat PDF
format,
XPress owners will need to purchase Acrobat (about $400) from Adobe to
get
that feature.
The new XPress comes out ahead in several
comparisons. For example,
while both products offer layers, in XPress's implementation, text
won't
wrap around objects on hidden layers, which can mystify and frustrate
InDesign
users. XPress provides more powerful features for working with
book-length
projects. And its Web-design options allow for creation of fancy
features
such as rollovers and image maps, where different parts of a picture
link
to different Web pages. (Web pages created with either program will
often
need fine-tuning in a dedicated Web-page creation application.)
Other points in Quark's favour: Because of its long
reign as
the standard publishing application, more users are already skilled at
using
XPress and professional service bureaus are used to working with that
program's
quirks. While the new version of XPress is inevitably bulkier than its
predecessors,
it is much faster than InDesign on older hardware.
Users with the need for pro-level page design tools
will find
the new InDesign offers more power than the new XPress. It will be
especially
welcomed by owners of new Mac or Windows hardware, adopters of Mac OS
X,
and graphics professionals proficient in using Photoshop or
Illustrator,
with which it shares a common interface.
Users of older XPress versions (and there are many
such users)
may prefer to make the more modest change to that program's new
version,
or may decide the best choice for now is to stick with what they're
currently
using.