QuarkXPress has been the number one page layout software package since the early 1990s, an automatic choice for graphic artists and publishing professionals. However, it has started to play second fiddle to its biggest rival, Adobe InDesign which along with the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite version 3 is rapidly becoming the automatic choice that QuarkXPress once was.

Adobe’s gang of four products are InDesign, a direct competitor to QuarkXPress often dubbed the Quark-killer, Photoshop, the widely-used image-manipulation software, Illustrator the vector graphics package and Acrobat which is used for creating and optimising PDF files. One huge advantage that Adobe now have over QuarkXPress is the way in which these programs interact with each other.

Quark’s rather complacent attitude in the late nineties and early noughties contributed significantly to the shift from QuarkXPress to InDesign. For numerous years QuarkXPress dominated the market. It was the automatic choice for anyone creating publications which were to be professionally printed and there was more than a touch of complacency in their attitude. Upgrades were slow in coming and the product cost the earth.

Users of page layout programs look like being the main beneficiaries of the rivalry between InDesign and QuarkXPress. The release of upgrades to QuarkXPress has greatly accelerated in the last few years, with version 8 not far away and each release now bringing genuinely improved functionality.

Quark naturally have no plans to come up with a QuarkXPress Creative Suite to rival Adobe. Rather, they are pointing out that before InDesign came along, designers were only too happy to use Adobe products in conjunction with QuarkXPress. They have tightened up the integration between QuarkXPress and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 by adding such features as support for native Photoshop files and the ability to manipulate imported .PSD files using the new PSD Import palette.

Will these tactics be enough to guarantee the survival of QuarkXPress? Most designers and publishing professionals see Adobe Creative Suite as the future. However, QuarkXPress is used in lots of different contexts and by users with vastly differing profiles. By responding to the needs of its potential market, Quark can ensure that QuarkXPress stays alive and continues to be recognised as an excellent piece of software.

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