Quark is trying really hard to lose customers

There once was a time when Quark XPress was the gold stan­dard of design soft­ware. The Quark loy­al­ists (and I was one) would­n’t go near a com­pet­ing prod­uct even for a favor­able inter­view in Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts. Adobe kept on putting out «Quark Killers» with new fea­tures in Page­Mak­er and then Inde­sign, and even pulled a Microsoft by includ­ing Inde­sign in the Adobe Cre­ative Suite for less mon­ey than the price of Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor togeth­er. Essen­tial­ly they paid their Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor cus­tomers to install Inde­sign. And still it did­n’t get used.

In the mean­time, Quark dil­ly-dal­lied around and took for­ev­er to release a ver­sion of XPress that would run on OS X. Essen­tial­ly this forced their cus­tomers to make a choice: run XPress in Clas­sic Mode (essen­tial­ly hob­bling your com­put­er) or don’t even run a work­able ver­sion of the Oper­at­ing Sys­tem. Final­ly ver­sion 6 came out and many of us were very excit­ed to see what we could do with an OS X native ver­sion of Quark XPress.

One of the advance­ments of OS X was to final­ly move away from Apple’s utter­ly moron­ic old font man­age­ment sys­tem. For each type­face on your sys­tem, there was an unin­tel­li­gi­ble set of files, one screen font, one met­rics font, one… I don’t even know. It was even stu­pid­er than the forty dif­fer­ent files that you need­ed to run a Post­Script font on Win­dows, and that was pret­ty darn user-unfriend­ly. But Apple’s design deci­sion to make the user take these indi­vid­ual files and pack them into a font «œsuit­case» made every­thing worse, because now there was no way to tell what could be wrong with a font that did­n’t print right or did­n’t show up where it was sup­posed to. It was all com­plete­ly FUBAR.

OS X as well as Win­dows 2000 began to sup­port Open­Type, which stuffed all the data from either a True­Type or a Post­Script font in one cross-plat­form file. The advan­tages of this were plen­ti­ful: first, it’s the same file on Macs and Win­dows machines, so you know that the font data is the same. If there’s any dif­fer­ence in ren­der­ing from plat­form to plat­form, it’s the fault of the OS, not the font.

The next advan­tage of Open­Type is that it sup­port­ed both the encod­ing types of True­Type and Post­Script. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, you can con­vert from either of the old font for­mats into Open­Type and have exact­ly the same font infor­ma­tion. Some of us that are more picky might car­ry on the argu­ments about bicu­bic ver­sus qua­drat­ic bezi­er curves, but the aver­age user does­n’t have to, and we can all use the same file format.

Final­ly, Open­Type sup­ports an «alpha­bet» of over 65,000 char­ac­ters, where­as Post­Script and True­Type kept us lim­it­ed to 255. While this may sound like plen­ty for a lan­guage with only 26 let­ters, con­sid­er that the total set of let­ters you may want to use will include both cap­i­tal and low­er­case, num­bers, and a vari­ety of punc­tu­a­tion marks. Add accent­ed char­ac­ters (for your résumé) and inter­na­tion­al char­ac­ters (have you ever trav­eled from Aus­tria to Ruß­land?) and you run out of your 255.

This is a great boon to design­ers, who have used even more char­ac­ters to rep­re­sent «advanced» typo­graph­i­cal marks. Many peo­ple don’t care if inch marks (“…”) are used instead of quo­ta­tion marks (“€œ…”€) but a pro­fes­sion­al deal­ing in typog­ra­phy should. In the old days before Uni­code and Open­Type, we had to use mul­ti­ple fonts to hold all the char­ac­ters in a sin­gle type­face. Now, we only need one.

But Quark XPress’s 6.0 (as well as 6.1 and 6.5) ver­sion sup­port­ed Open­Type in a very non-mean­ing­ful way. Yes, you could use Open­Type fonts, but the char­ac­ters in Quark XPress files were still lim­it­ed to the 0 – 255 range. So any­one that went to get Open­Type ver­sions of fonts was out of luck if they want­ed access to the advanced characters.

Quark’s offi­cial response was that Open­Type was a con­spir­a­cy to destroy design, and that real design­ers would choose Quark XPress over OpenType.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, even us diehard Quark loy­al­ists tried Adobe Inde­sign. I went out and bought a copy, antic­i­pat­ing that I’d need to know Inde­sign if I ever want­ed to get any design work again.

But I am still a Quark loy­al­ist. Noth­ing would make me hap­pi­er than to keep on using Quark XPress. I’m will­ing to put up with a lot, includ­ing hav­ing paid for a ver­sion of the soft­ware that was so com­plete­ly use­less that I could­n’t even do my own résumé with it. It says a great deal about my attach­ment to Quark XPress that I’d even both­er to go to the Quark.com web­site to find out how much they want for an upgrade from my use­less, hob­bled ver­sion (6.5) to the new 7.0 ver­sion released a few months ago that final­ly per­mits access to the full range of char­ac­ters in an Open­Type font.

Quark still sub­scribes to the the­o­ry that any infor­ma­tion about its busi­ness prac­tices is pro­pri­etary and none of any­one’s busi­ness. This appar­ent­ly includes pric­ing. With­out log­ging in with a pass­word and enter­ing your ser­i­al num­ber, it’s impos­si­ble to find an upgrade price for their prod­uct on their website.

I went through the has­sle, and they want $250. That’s a lot less than the $750 they’re ask­ing for the full ver­sion, but it seems like a lot of mon­ey for a bug­fix, espe­cial­ly after mak­ing me jump through their hoops.

Some peo­ple will say that Inde­sign is final­ly Adobe’s Quark-killer. The rest of us know that the real Quark-killer is Quark.