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Quarkxpress, Very Much Alive But For How Much Longer |
By:
Andrew Whiteman |
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Quarkxpress, Very Much Alive But For How Much Longer
Andrew Whiteman
QuarkXPress has enjoyed some 15 years of total dominance of the professional page layout software arena. However, it now looks set to become an underdog in a market which is increasingly being dominated by Adobe InDesign and the other programs that make up the Adobe Creative Suite, a software bundle which is rapidly becoming a must-have for any serious graphic design software set-up.
The huge advantage that Adobe has in this battle of the DTP giants is that most users and potential users of QuarkXPress will also be users of one or more members of the Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. Every time the question of upgrades comes around, there will always be the option, for such users, of upgrading one of their Adobe products to the Adobe Creative Suite rather than just upgrading to the latest version of QuarkXPress.
Many will say that Quark only have themselves to blame for the uphill struggle they now face. It's almost as if they believed that their position in the marketplace was somehow unassailable. QuarkXPress was for many years way overpriced and lacking in features but it was the only piece of page layout software which could be relied upon to deliver consistent results in the prepress environment.
Having these two great products battling it out is basically a good thing for the marketplace. QuarkXPress 7 included features which are a clearly a direct response to features introduced in InDesign CS2 and we can expect this kind of tit-for-tat development to continue in future releases of the two programs.
Quark naturally have no plans to come up with a QuarkXPress Creative Suite to rival Adobe. Rather, they are pointing out that before InDesign came along, designers were only too happy to use Adobe products in conjunction with QuarkXPress. They have tightened up the integration between QuarkXPress and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 by adding such features as support for native Photoshop files and the ability to manipulate imported .PSD files using the new PSD Import palette.
So, does QuarkXPress have much of a future? Most designers have now chosen InDesign as their preferred page layout software. However, it is not just designers and publishing professionals who will determine Quark's future. There are many users in the corporate and education sectors and, as with the web arena, there are an increasing number of non-specialist users of QuarkXPress who may be targeted in the future with the release of an intro-level version of the software.
The author has been running http://www.macresource.co.uk/courses/quark.htm) training courses on QuarkXPress for many years. He is a trainer with http://www.macresource.co.uk) Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent IT training company based in London. Click here to get your own http://www.uberarticles.com/home.php?id=36997&b=79 unique version of this article.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article64673.html |
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