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QuarkXPress has been the number one page layout software package since the early 1990s, an automatic choice for graphic artists and publishing professionals. However, it has started to play second fiddle to its biggest rival, Adobe InDesign which along with the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite version 3 is rapidly becoming the automatic choice that QuarkXPress once was.

It’s hard to see how QuarkXPress can be the eventual winner in this battle. For one thing, it is the only main product that Quark make; Adobe have the entire Creative Suite, in all its many varieties, and will presumably continue to think up clever benefits to using InDesign, the main competitor to QuarkXPress, in conjunction with the rest of the creative suite. This strategy is all the more likely to succeed when you consider that most QuarkXPress users will also be users of Photoshop and possibly other programs in the Creative Suite.

A fair amount of complacency with their apparently unassailable position as the best page layout program out led Quark to make several key strategic errors such as the release in 2002 of QuarkXPress version 5 for Mac OS 9 (an obsolete version of the Mac operating system) shortly after Adobe had released InDesign 2 which ran on the latest Mac OS X operating system.

The fierce rivalry between InDesign and QuarkXPress will probably be good news for users of page layout software. We can expect the rapid addition of cool new features in each new release of the two programs and, hopefully, equally speedy releases of bug fixes.

In response to Adobe’s claims of tight integration between InDesign and other Creative Suite programs, Quark seem to be taking the “If you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. QuarkXPress now allows the importing of files saved in Photoshop’s native .PSD file extension and has a nifty PSD Import palette which allows sophisticated manipulation of elements within the file. Because these changes are shown in the context of the final layout, there may even be an argument for making these changes in QuarkXPress rather than Photoshop.

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.

Tags: Software

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