Does InDesign finally have a strong competitor?
QXP2015 image copied for review purposes: the new 2016 logo seems similar
I’ve always disliked QuarkXPress. Even when it was king of the hill, I was using PageMaker and InDesign 1.0. But there’s no denying that it was King—until it shot itself in the foot. It treated it’s customers very poorly, and its upgrade policies were ridiculously expensive.
When InDesign came out with unlimited redoes, OpenType support, no need for a separate frame tool, and dozens of other major features, Quark was left behind, very rapidly.
Is InDesign the Quark of the early 21st?
It’s beginning to look that way. Quark may be ramping up its product. In an article [beta review], Quark 2016 is bringing some powerful stuff to the table. I’ve heard rumors, over the years that Quark is slowly coming up to par with InDesign. Is this where they start leapfrogging ahead?
From the Quark site:
Convert PDF, Illustrator and EPS Files to Native QuarkXPress Objects
Say goodbye to time-consuming projects (think rebuilding logos and reconstructing PDF files sent by your clients). QuarkXPress is the first layout application to import PDF, Illustrator and EPS files and convert them to native objects (restrictions apply). Look forward to fully editable Bezier versions of vector graphics, real text and automatically extracted colors and fonts.
Copy and Paste Objects from Illustrator, PowerPoint and Others to QuarkXPress
Simply copy items from other applications such as PowerPoint, Illustrator or even InDesign and paste them into your QuarkXPress layout as Native QuarkXPress Objects (Restrictions apply), allowing you to easily complete or reuse them up in QuarkXPress 2016.
As Martin says in his article, this has changed his whole workflow. Just the ability to actually use Excel and PowerPoint graphics as native objects is huge.
They still have a long way to go to match InDesign in feature sets. You can see from the potential new features, that they haven’t even caught up with that feature.
But what about the huge price?
Yes, Quark still uses the old model—of buying the software. The original purchase is huge—close to $900 US. Martin says that Quark costs him less than $300 US a year [after the initial purchase]. However, you actually own it. You do not have to upgrade, unless you want to. Plus, you actually own the software!
The Creative Cloud is a huge burden for many at about $50 a month, or $600 a year in the US {more elsewhere]. For InDesign alone, it’s $20/month and $120/year US [in the US]. And it never stops. Increasingly they are offering improvements that no one but the large companies care about. They are getting increasingly buggy. In addition, I do not trust Clouds. Adobe has a long history of making radical changes to online availability with no notice.
And you never actually own the software!
If Quark cuts its price in half, InDesign could be hurting quite quickly.
We’ve still not seen what new features Adobe will bring to ID in 2016. They might be impressive enough to shake off the feeling that ID development is languishing. But as you note, we have reason to worry.
The biggest new development, Publish Online, is a feature whose primary beneficaries are large companies needing a way to post in-house documentation. I can use it to post review copies of my books, but that’s about all. Not much for $600 in subscription costs each year. And the other changes in the last year or so hardly rate above the ‘mere tweaks’ level. The pace is definitely far below that I expected when Adobe went to subscriptions. We were treated better when the product sold.
As an editor and publisher, I’m particularly ticked off that ID’s Hunspell dictionary remains so poor. Microsoft, Apple and Adobe all use it, but don’t seem to want to fund its development despite their huge profits. The vocabulary is poor. The spell-checking lookup is dreadful. I can’t have optional dictionaries for a single document or a project. There are no medical, scientific, or legal dictionaries I can flip on and I do layout for a scientific/legal publisher. For Adobe, that’s not something that’d be hard to implement. All they need do it buy the rights to pre-existing dictionaries to give us something for our $50 a month. The could also simply buy the rights to some of the more useful scripts to add features.
https://hunspell.github.io
I’m frustrated enough, I’m considering switching my $50 plan to a $20, ID-only one and perhaps adding the $10 Photoshop plan for a single month when I need to create book covers. I want to send a message to Adobe that it’s neglecting ID, and that’s perhaps the best way to do it. At the moment, the upper management seems to be caught up in the glitz of improving their web and video apps to the exclusion of all else.
–Mike Perry
I agree, Michael. I’m thinking of the same switch and use CS6 for Photoshop.
This sounds like good news. I am hopeful. Thanks for making us aware, and keeping us aware.