Will Quarkxpress Survive The Adobe Onslaught

QuarkXPress, for so long the dominant force in the page layout arena, now finds itself fighting for survival and under attach by four products all created by Adobe, who look like achieving the same kind of dominance in the creative market that Microsoft have achieved in the general computing market.

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.

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.

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, what does the future hold for QuarXPress? Well, whilst it now appears that most design professionals see InDesign as the future of page layout, it's important to remember that not all users of QuarkXPress are designers. A lot of corporations now buy QuarkXPress for producing in-house publications. So, in the future, we may see different flavours of the program emerging aimed at different types of user.

By: Andrew Whiteman

The author has been running QuarkXPress training courses for many years. He is a trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an established, independent computer training company based in London.

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