InDesign vs. Quark: Printers in between

In the publishing industry, Adobe InDesign, a graphic design software, is creating headaches for rival QuarkXPress as well as local printers that now must be ready to handle customers? files in either program.

Introduced in 1999, InDesign is being labeled by some fans as the ?Quark-killer? due to its ease of use and the numerous features it offers that Quark does not.

?Quark is pretty much a dead program,? said Alan Dague-Greene, designer at Boulder-based Vermilion Inc. The advertising and design firm replaced Quark with InDesign approximately two years ago.

With InDesign, Dague-Greene has found that basic tasks ? such as creating style sheets and setting images ? are easier to complete. InDesign also offers automatic typographic adjustment by paragraph, while Quark is limited to a line-by-line adjustment. This feature reduces the time it takes to complete projects such as catalogs, he said, because InDesign automatically applies the style sheet to listings of prices, product names and descriptions.

Additionally, Dague-Greene said, InDesign offers high-resolution previews of objects such as TIFF and EPS files. With Quark, the option to see high-resolution previews is not standard; designers must acquire a free Xtension.

As another perk, InDesign also is priced less than Quark. The InDesign software sells for $690 on Amazon.com, while Quark retails for $800. Or users can opt to purchase Adobe?s Creative Suite 2, which combines full new versions of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive and Acrobat, for $1,145.

But even if InDesign was more expensive than Quark, Dague-Greene said the productivity his company has gained from the switch would have made up the price difference.

Making the transition
Longmont-based Avocet Communications transitioned to InDesign from Quark more than two years ago. Art Director Steven Severin said the marketing and advertising firm made the switch after he downloaded it as a trial and found InDesign to be more intuitive and complementary to other Adobe programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

A key benefit of InDesign, Severin said, is its built-in, pre-flight package, which pulls together all the images and fonts for the printer and alerts designers of potential mistakes with issues such as resolution and spot colors. With Quark, he explained, there was an additional charge for this feature. With InDesign, it is a standard feature packaged into the software.

Severin also likes that InDesign allows unlimited undos, while earlier versions of Quark provide only one undo. ?(InDesign) is much more forgiving,? he said. Quark 6.0, however, does offer multiple undos.

Though some have embraced Adobe?s design software, others in the industry are not overly enthusiastic fans.

In Longmont, design firm Red Wall Communications uses InDesign in addition to Quark, but not as a replacement.

Owner Jean Ditslear likes features such as the ability to add drop shadows and the ease of formatting available through InDesign, but adds that printing problems have made her wary of the program.

Though images in InDesign have appeared OK onscreen, these same images have printed differently, she said, causing her to work creatively around such glitches.

Even as more designers increasingly become comfortable with InDesign, Quark continues to surpass InDesign in market share to date. As a result, some printers, such as Morrell Graphics in Lafayette, have yet to adopt InDesign.

Others that use the Adobe program wonder if it will continue to gain customers.

At Trinity Printing in Longmont, owner Charlie Dehn estimated that less than 10 percent of his client base uses InDesign. The print shop began using InDesign about a year ago, but Dehn still prefers Quark because of its consistency and ease of use.

Case in point: When Trinity prepared to print a brochure designed in InDesign, Dehn said the spacing, type size, leading and type style changed on the document, creating problems.
?With Quark, we?re always good to go. I have yet to have a problem with Quark,? he said. Dehn added that he wished his client?s money spent on InDesign would instead be diverted to further upgrade Quark. ?When you have something that works, why trash it??

Bypassing problems
At D&K Printing in Boulder, Josh DeWitt, digital prepress production artist, said the biggest difficulties with InDesign involve transparency and drop shadows, which he said the program?s RIP (raster image processor) could not handle as needed to prepare a page for display or printing. To complete projects with this problem, D&K sometimes must use ?workarounds? that bypass the problem, allowing the job to look as originally intended. DeWitt labeled these as time-consuming, inefficient solutions.

?Drop shadows and transparency are easier to achieve in InDesign,? he explained, which is why more designers opt to use these features with InDesign rather than Quark. But it?s also why printers see more problems with these design features in the Adobe program.

To achieve transparency with Quark, for example, designers must make a graphic transparent, flatten the file, save it and place it in a design program. To change the transparency, they open the file in Photoshop, modify the original image, reflatten it, resave it and reimport it.
With InDesign, a designer can drop in a native Photoshop file or any other supported image and adjust the opacity through a familiar Photoshoplike slider, complete with blending modes.
Despite glitches with transparency and drop shadows, however, DeWitt said he has been impressed with the Adobe software, and added that he finds it is easier to use. ?Once over the initial learning curve, you find it has great interface ? and it?s more stable,? he said.

With some versions of Quark, when users try to save a file, the program would say the file could not be written to a disk, DeWitt explained. As a result, the user would need to resave the file as something else.

In Louisville, Centennial Printing has used InDesign since 2000, and Office Manager Andy Gontar said the number of clients that use the program is starting to grow. He estimates about 25 percent of Centennial customers currently use the Adobe design software, and he hopes this number grows.

With InDesign, it can take less time to process a project, Gontar said. When doing a two-color job in Quark, for example, the software goes through CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black, the standard color model used in offset printing) for each color and always looks for four colors. InDesign, on the other hand, automatically identifies that the project has only two colors. ?The process is smoother? with InDesign, he said.

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