I had to disagree: “That’s assuming you already bought and use Photoshop. I can think of two reasons why Quark’s approach makes sense: economics and creativity. Economics: imagine a production shop with dozens of seats of QuarkXPress. It’s possible that you wouldn’t have to buy dozens of copies of Photoshop for those users. Creativity: those users can perform their image work directly within QuarkXPress, and see the results immediately within the context of the layout page — you can’t do that in InDesign, even if you pay for the entire Creative Suite and also pay to upgrade it every 18 months.”

My point hit me in the head twice the next day. I was noodling around with Quark’s Flash tools, Easy Flash from QuarkXPress, and only had a print version of a logo in my layout. Being CMYK, it looked a bit washed out. So, I turned to Picture Effects to nondestructively increase its saturation.

These adjustments produce the identical results as in Photoshop

30 seconds later, the job was fixed. No new image files. No switching to Photoshop. The second time, I needed a grayscale version of an image because in this particular layout, the image would look better in grayscale than in color. Picture Effects to the rescue again: decrease saturation. Done.

I could have used any of these Photoshop-identical filters, but didn’t need to.

So I started thinking… I have Photoshop and I know how to use it reasonably well. But because I remembered that QuarkXPress has Picture Effects built in, I shaved several minutes off of my production time, and didn’t have to keep track of two new image files — saving brain cells as well.

And that started me thinking about all the other dozens of new features added in QuarkXPress 7 and 8 that I don’t immediately think to use. I suspect that I’m in the same boat as zillions of other QuarkXPress users, who haven’t taken the time to incorporate the new features into my way of thinking about QuarkXPress. Now I intend to review all those new features… and use as many of them as I can.

My favorite highlight about the new interface is:

“The process isn’t just more efficient, the creative freedom it enables will lead to more exciting use of images and better designs.”

And my about Flash integration:

“Put it all together and QuarkXPress 8 provides a very useful design-rich alternative to Adobe Flash CS3 Professional for SWF authoring. …With its recent launch of Acrobat 9, Adobe is merging the previously separate worlds of SWF and PDF. QuarkXPress 8’s Flash authoring capabilities mean that it should be especially well placed to take advantage of this new offline delivery route for interactive publications.”

I couldn’t agree more.

“How long did it take to upgrade Quark? It asked for the serial number (on the box) and then the serial number of the last upgrade (found by checking the “about Quark” menu). Once those numbers were typed in, it did the installation. Then it activated itself on-line. Total time: 15 minutes.

“Contrast that with the freaking nightmare of a CS3 upgrade. Wants the serial number of the upgrade package. Wants the serial number of the last upgrade package. No wait, that’s not enough, then it wants the serial number of the upgrade before the last frickin’ upgrade.

“Then after all is said and done, it barfs on activation and I have to reformat the hard drive according to Adobe technical support. Thanks guys, I hope Quark 8 can cure cancer when it’s released and the whole franchise comes back from the dead to kick you guys in the nuts because a little competition is needed here.”

I had to chuckle.

You can read his entire post here, A Nice Thing to Say About Quark…

Here’s one highlight: when Chuck asked me how Quark is different these days, I replied:

“You take a whole new crew of people in, with a gem of a product, and allow them to polish it and show it off and tell the world about it — that’s how I see Quark right now.”

The interview is 41 minutes long. You can listen to it, or downloaded it, at the iTunes Store and the MacVoices website.

—————————

Q:
Is QuarkXPress able to do this? We have Quark 6.5.

(from an M.I.T. how-to for InDesign) Images Inline with text: You can place your cursor in the main text frame and just choose File> Place. Just click with the loaded cursor where you want the image to appear. This will place your picture inside a text frame of the correct size inline with your text. This means that if you choose “Select All” both the text and images will become selected. This means that you won’t be able to select and replace only the text. However, the benefit is that the images will move with the text, so that if you want the images to be located near specific phrases, you don’t have to worry about the location changing if you add or remove text. You do not need to worry about text wrap with this method. Just enlarge the text frame if the text gets too close to the pictures.

Reply #1:
Yes, since version 3. Create a picture box, cut it, place your cursor where you want it to appear in the text, paste.

Reply #2:
It’s a surprisingly little-known feature. So many times I’ve used this and people have been like, “Holy cow! He’s hacking Quark!”

—————————

It seems to me that there’s a tremendous opportunity for QuarkXPress trainers out there. With a little help from Quark, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of users could be introduced to the “new” features in QuarkXPress 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Maybe Quark could wage an information war, bombarding customers with regular communications on exactly what QuarkXPress is capable of. It’s clear that most users have no idea of the power waiting inside QuarkXPress.

Just a thought.

“The only time I enjoyed myself was when I was working in Quark. Which surprised me because I was petrified of a new program. I tend to be a person against change, but this change was completely for the better. I feel that I learned a lot, and will be able to use Quark in the future for future tasks in life. (no trying to suck up — I actually mean it)”

www.ddzicek125.blogspot.com/2007/12/bibi-card-quark-and-photoshop.html

Intel Macs won’t run Apple’s Classic environment, which is the Mac OS 9 emulator. And since QuarkXPress 4 and 5 are Mac OS 9 applications… you get the picture.

Ditto for Leopard. It simply won’t run Classic. So even if you install Leopard on a G4 or G5 Mac, QuarkXPress 4 and 5 are a no-go.

My blanket recommendation for anyone upgrading to an Intel Mac or Leopard is to keep their last Mac that ran Classic. (Ideally, one that can start up in Mac OS 9.) That way, in an emergency, you can start up that Mac and use your Mac OS 9 apps.

Here, we keep a 1.67 GHz G4 Titanium PowerBook on the shelf. That was the last, fastest PowerBook, and it doesn’t take up much room.

The story below is from Rob Underwood, who spends his days helping organizations learn how to use InDesign. In this story, he speaks out against blindly adopting an InDesign workflow, when keeping a QuarkXPress workflow would make much more sense — and save tons of money and time. I have personally seen quite a lot of this thoughtless adoption, and witnessed the regrets and suffering of the victims of those who made these decisions. So, I’m happy to see Rob share his real-world experiences and offer his meaningful suggestions to hardworking professionals.

InDesign is the better tool for many users — but not all users. It seems to me that Quark’s 10+ year monopoly of the desktop publishing space has created an “all or nothing” mentality around using a desktop publishing application: we expect everyone to use the same application, so when there are two viable options, some of us get lazy and adopt the one that’s begin shouted about the loudest. A symptom of our times, I suppose. (Does anyone else find it ironic that although we’re players in an industry that specializes in knowing the tricks to convince people to buy things that aren’t appropriate for them, we ourselves don’t see when we’re being fooled into buying the emperor’s new clothes?)

—Jay Nelson

If you’re using MediaSpan’s NewsEditPro with QuarkXPress, do yourself a favor — don’t switch to InDesign.

After years of using the NewsEditPro system, and doing countless so-called “upgrades” teaching many newspapers InDesign and InCopy, I have come to the conclusion that NewsEditPro does not work well in InDesign. Let me tell you why…

About NewsEditPro and QuarkXPress

NewsEditPro is a great little database system for newspapers. Writers write stories in NewsEditPro, and they are stored in the database. Upon saving they can add data to their story, such as the writer’s name and department. Every time the story is edited, a new version is saved allowing you to go back in time and see each revision. When writers need to find their stories they can run queries to find the stories they wrote based on author, or the stage of the life of the story, ie: whether the story has been edited or already run.

Meanwhile, the designers can search the database for stories related to the section they are currently building. For example, they may search Sports for all the Sports stories. Here is where the ease of use comes in: the designer can simply drag and drop the story from a list that appears, and the story with a separate headline box appears on the QuarkXPress page. In Quark you can simply use the item tool to manipulate the geometry of both the story and the headline box seperately. Once dropped, it knows it has been placed onto a Quark page and the status of the story changes. This is how the story can then know that in, say, 24 hours from being placed, it will go into the Websend folder, where it will be tagged with html tags so that the Web department can easily place the story on the website.

But in InDesign…

In InDesign, the process is similar but aggravatingly different. You write stories and save them to the database, but when you drag and drop a story onto the InDesign page, InDesign groups the headline and the body of the story together. This makes it extremely difficult to move the headline separate from the body. There are workarounds I have discovered, but they are workarounds, and none of them are as intuitive or fluid as the ease of use in Quark.

In Quark, you drag in a story with a headline attached and you can work on each box individually to control the size. In InDesign they come in grouped so you if you try to control the size with the Selection tool, both boxes get scaled. So you are then forced to use the Direct Select tool. What ends up happening is that if you don’t deselect the object and then select directly into the middle of the box, you end up changing the structure and geometry of the headline box.

Even worse, if you mistakenly click on the “in” port of a story instead of its corner point, that story will be loaded into your cursor. At this point, you better hope you worked in PageMaker long enough to understand what is happening to you. If not, the safer approach is to use only the text tool (never the selection tools) and learn how to master the use of the Command key (Win: Control key) at the correct times to be able to work with each box separately.

So the question is: why are they grouped? Why can’t I just ungroup them? The simple answer is that if you were to ungroup the boxes, the headline would no longer be related to the story. So, when the story is uploaded to the Web, or saved in the archive folder for later viewing, it will have no headline. This creates extra work for the Web department, and it also makes it hard to search the story based on its headline. (This negates a major advantage of using NewsEditPro, which is that it keeps saving the latest version of the story back to the database.)

Other Nasty Workarounds

I have seen workarounds that are much worse than the one I described above. For example, I’ve seen publications that put the headline, story, pull quote, and caption in one box, and then drag that into InDesign and then create new boxes for each part. Then they manually link the boxes together so that the parts stay connected. Could you imagine trying to work like this! I’ve seen it and it isn’t pretty. You edit a few words in the body and you mess up the location of the pull quote, caption and whatever else is linked. Stick with Quark…

The sad scenario I’ve seen too often is that someone hears that InDesign and InCopy are a great editorial workflow, and they surmise that these two programs alone could replace their current NewsEditPro system. Wrongo. They decide to scrap NewsEditPro and buy InCopy for the editors and InDesign for the designers. The first problem that arises is: Where do we store the stories? They set up a folder structure that resembles the “status” levels in News Edit. (See my earlier entry: “How to Start a Publication”.) The only problem is that if the story is placed into InDesign, it cannot be moved into the next folder without the link breaking. And you cannot change the filename, or the link breaks. Then to top it off, you cannot save versions of InCopy stories — not easily anyway. You could use Version Que, but once the stories come back for editing as assignments, the versions are gone.

Unexpected Costs

It is usually at this point that companies realize they should have stayed with Quark, but they are now invested in InDesign, and realize they need to sink more money into a database solution like Woodwing’s Smart Enterprise or Softcare’s K4 to get all the things they had in NewsEditPro.

Another $20K later and they may be somewhat satisfied, even though they have to spend at least another $10K for training, and all the while the whole staff is complaining: “Why did we switch?” I have also worked with many companies that have switched to K4. Then their number one gripe is that K4 is not drag-and-drop from the database — it’s clunky, requiring too many steps to use an item from the database. You first have to tell an InDesign frame that it’s a K4 object before you can even place an article into the frame. No thanks.

My Advice

So here is my advice: if you’re using QuarkXPress and NewsEditPro, you know that they work beautifully together. Don’t waste your money on InDesign. Instead, save some money: upgrade Quark, upgrade NewsEditPro. With the considerable money left over from what it would have cost to switch to InDesign, get one of your IT staff properly trained in NewsEditPro so you can use it to its fullest potential and streamline your newspaper and Web publication. Or, buy your page layout people a newer version of Photoshop and some training, so they can be more creative. Or send me the money, because I just saved you the cost of making a mistake. Just whatever you do, don’t jump into an InDesign conversion and dump NewsEditPro because you heard it was what everyone else was doing. They jumped off a bridge… are you next?

(Editor’s note: for a related in-depth comparison of QuarkXPress and InDesign, see “Report on Editorial Workflow Systems” and also “QuarkXPress 7 vs. InDesign CS3: Analysis of efficiency, workflow, workgroup support, and productivity.”)

He works with a lot of small publishers, and his stories are based on the techniques he sees being used in the real world. In a system such as this, the only tools being used are QuarkXPress and your operating system’s filing capabilities — and some cleverness.

But if you have a larger publication, you’ll need a dedicated editorial workflow solution. These systems aren’t cheap, but they pay for themselves in asset flexibility and re-use, and time saved. Systems exist for both InDesign and QuarkXPress, but comparing them is a gigantic task. It’s not just a question of comparing features, but also of comparing usability. And that takes an experienced expert in both disciplines (workflow requirements AND user experience).

Erik Vlietinck of IT-Enquirer is uniquely qualified to perform such a comparison. In the past, he has quantitatively compared the usability of various applications and operating systems, and qualitatively recommended one over the others. He has also been actively involved in editorial workflows for many years. His most recent project was to compare the most popular and powerful editorial workflow systems for InDesign and QuarkXPress: Softcare’s K4 and WoodWing’s Smart Connection Enterprise for InDesign, and Quark’s Quark Publishing System 7 for QuarkXPress.

His “Report on Editorial Workflow Systems” is a 40-page summary of the strengths and weaknesses of K4, Smart Connection Enterprise and QPS 7, with plenty of screen captures of each system’s interface. The report can be downloaded for free at the IT-Enquirer website.

Below is a chart from the report that summarizes the strong and weak points of each system.

(Click for larger image)

As I read the full report, my highlighter fell on these points:

From his Executive Summary:
“Smart Connection Enterprise… blends in… there is virtually no training needed… built entirely on open source technology.”

“K4… has been built on a proprietary database… more difficult to set up and manage.”

“Quark Publishing System 7 is a radical and dramatic break with the past. …performs even better than Smart Connection Enterprise. …based entirely on open source technologies… integrates with a large number of databases… includes QuarkXPress Server and basically does everything Smart Connection Enterprise does, but even better.”

QPS 7 delivers “more scalability, more granular control, better visual feedback, more obvious XML support, and even less training required than Smart Connection Enterprise.”

Setup:
Smart Connection Enterprise “is easy to understand, and the manuals… are of unique quality. …Adding functionality to the server yourself is a matter of knowing PHP5 and MySQL programming.

K4 “requires the administrator to select and run a command-line script that will initiate a publication. …the script only installs one publication, which is the recommended maximum allowed…” And the manuals and help screens “should be more helpful.”

In QPS 7, “The management of new publications, users, roles, groups, assignments, and everything else in an editorial workflow, looked the least complicated… No scripting was necessary and all settings could be managed using check boxes, icons, radio buttons, and multiple choice forms.”

Architecture:
QPS 7 is unique, and its architecture makes it very fast: “The database holds the metadata and the file system on the file server holds the files. The system streams files to the user’s computer. …Upon check in QPS copies the file back to the file server as a new revision, and once the copy has been validated, it will remove the file from the user’s computer… or save a local copy on the user’s system,” depending on how preferences are set.

Text-driven Workflows:
QPS 7 lets you use “any application to type content. …MS Word, TextEdit, etc… QPS 7 has a palette system that… offers the most information of the three. …Communication between non-Quark applications and QPS happens without the application being burdened by a plug-in.”

Layout-driven Workflows:
“In Softcare K4, a user can check in an article even as it is checked out… defying one of the main reasons why a check-in, check-out system exists at all.”

“QPS will even work with InDesign — although only on the file level… Unique to QPS 7 is its use of Job Jackets for layout enforcement. …including H&Js, the colors and inks to use, and even preflighting information. …they can ensure that corporate identity… is guaranteed in the end result.”

Deadlines:
“Smart Connection Enterprise supports deadlines… colors are used to show which components, issues and articles are due soon or are overdue. This… is unique.”

Content Editing, Redlining, Reviewing:
“Redlining applied in QuarkCopyDesk can be displayed in QuarkXPress 7.3, which is unique to the Quark Publishing System. A big difference between InCopy and QuarkCopyDesk is that the latter divides an article up into components… text and pictures.” Also, QuarkCopyDesk has the “Split Screen” viewing mode found in QuarkXPress 7, which “allows editors to see the WYSIWYG representation of an article right beside the galley.”

“In QPS 7… a layout evaluation (preflight) can be demanded at check-in time or at output time.”

“Both Smart Connection Enterprise and QPS 7 support Web editing out-of-the-box.” But for “…WYSIWYG previews in Smart Connection Enterprise, you must buy the InDesign Server, an additional expense…” And even then, “there isn’t any information available with regards to copyfit editing. Such information is available in QPS 7 out-of-the-box… the (Web or local) user has a view of the layout, a galley view of his text, the status information, and even a styles palette view if he wants to. …if the layout designer changes the geometry, the WebEditor… will see the new layout, with new copyfit information.”

But what happens when the server is offline? “Smart Connection Enterprise… can save the file to a local folder and lock the article in the database… QPS 7 offers similar capabilities.”

Replication, Publication Sharing, File Serving:
“QPS 7 has the most extensive replication and sharing architecture… to copy the assets… one server can manage multiple publications and you can share content between those publications.”

Versioning:
“Adobe Version Cue is a solid, robust system, but it doesn’t offer much in terms of granularity… there is no way you can set versions to be kept for a limited number of days… the administrator has to step in and remove them…”

In QPS 7 “the administrator can set the rules for file versioning, including user privileges with respect to viewing, printing and reverting a document’s version. …Administrators can select to keep only a limited number of versions, for a limited time, etc.”

User Interface Experiences:
The report includes many screen shots of the user interfaces of all three products. His conclusions:

“…with QPS… you literally don’t have to think about what you must do with an icon, and you can even preview the content of documents. …QPS ships with a version of the QuarkXPress Server 7, which takes care of the previews.”

Why is the interface so important? “…if editors, writers, photographers and everybody else who is going to use the system can perform at least the basic tasks without having to consult a manual, it saves both in time and in training.”

I believe this is an often-overlooked benefit we should all demand from our software vendors.

To read the executive summary, or download the full report, go to the IT-Enquirer’s website.

Talking of sci-fi, I am currently halfway through a year-long project for a publisher of Japanese animated sci-fi movies on DVD. The house style dictates that every movie still must be accompanied by a full copyright credit, even though all the credits are identical.

At first, I used to copy and paste the 20 or so text boxes containing the same credit line manually, then do it all over again for the next issue, and again the next, and so on. What a bore. If only those credit boxes were like synchronized swimmers and I could drown the lot of them…

…which is pretty much what I do now. Several months ago, I added one of the credit boxes to the Shared Content palette (both content and attributes), then generated all the other credit lines from that unique shared item. Let me tell you, it’s a damn sight quicker than cutting and pasting 5pt text in tiny boxes scattered over eight pages. And when the next issue comes round, I type the new copyright credit in just one box, whereupon all the other credit boxes update automatically, ready for me to redesign the layout.

I’m sure QuarkXPress’ Shared Content feature was designed for much more sophisticated functions than that, but it’s a real time-saver just the same. And I don’t need waterproof makeup and nose-plugs, either.