As last week's article discussed, with
its newly updated page design program InDesign 2.0, Adobe is trying to grab
users away from longtime leader Quark XPress. Quark, however, is trying
to maintain its market share with its long-awaited version 5.0 (US$995,
$275-375 for upgrades from earlier versions).
On paper, the two products have a lot of similarities. Each is sold
in Mac and Windows versions, each adds long-needed tools for working
with tables and layers, and both enable users to design for both print
and the Web.
Mac-users looking to migrate to OS X will be disappointed that,
unlike Adobe's new product, XPress 5.0 lacks native support for Apple's
new operating system. XPress 5 will run under OS X, but more
slowly than under the older OS 9. Quark promises that the next
version will run directly under OS X, whenever that might be
released.
Quark's new Web design tools are more comprehensive than InDesign's.
But where InDesign allows users to create a single design and export
both print and Web versions, XPress projects must be dedicated to a
single use. Text and graphics from a print project have to be awkwardly
copied and pasted to a separate Web-focused project.
XPress's type tools are little changed from previous versions and
have been surpassed by InDesign's new features. XPress's user
interface, too, offers little change, though this will be a relief to
users who have learned on earlier versions. InDesign supports multiple
languages within a single document; Quark only offers this to
purchasers of their much more expensive Quark XPress Passport
version.
InDesign also gets the nod for graphics support. Unlike XPress, it
can work with native Photoshop and Illustrator files, perhaps no
surprise given their common Adobe heritage. Graphics-heavy documents,
either saved or exported to Acrobat format, produce significantly
slimmer files in InDesign as well, a real benefit when uploading them
to service bureaus for professional printing.
Many owners of previous XPress versions expanded the program's
capabilities with extra-cost add-in XTensions. Some of those features
are now built into the new version, but owners who have invested
heavily in 3rd-party XTensions should check whether they will work with
the new version. While InDesign offers built-in support for Adobe's
popular Acrobat PDF format, XPress owners will need to purchase Acrobat
(about $250) from Adobe to get that feature.
The new XPress comes out ahead in several comparisons. For example,
while both products offer layers, in XPress's implementation, text
won't wrap around objects on hidden layers, which can mystify and
frustrate InDesign users. XPress provides more powerful features for
working with book-length projects. And its Web design options allow for
creation of fancy features like roll-overs and image maps, where
different parts of a picture link to different Web pages. (Web pages
created with either program will often need fine-tuning in a dedicated
Web page creation application.)
Other points in Quark's favour: Because of its long reign as the
standard publishing application, more users are already skilled at
using XPress, and professional service bureaus are used to working with
that program's quirks. That infrastructure doesn't exist for
InDesign.
While the new version of XPress is inevitably bulkier than its
predecessors, it is much faster than InDesign on older hardware.
Users with the need for pro-level page design tools will find the
new InDesign offers more power than the new XPress. It will be
especially welcomed by owners of new Mac or Windows hardware, adopters
of Mac OS X, and graphics professionals proficient in using
Photoshop or Illustrator with which it shares a common interface.
Users of older XPress versions (and there are many such users) may
prefer to make the more modest change to that program's new version or
may decide that the best choice for now is to stick with what they're
currently using.
You can order XPress 5.0
from
Amazon.com for US$980.
This article originally appeared in Business in Vancouver.
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