Quark Upgrade Promotion

[Cory Smith]

I saw last week that quark is offering significant price reductions to get people to upgrade to quark 8.

Quark: About Quark - Press Release Detail

Just curious how many people are still seeing a significant amount of quark files. If you are, what versions are you seeing.

We probably have one or two clients that have stuck it out with quark, but the majority have jumped shipped to the CS suite. Of the quark files that we do see, most are still Quark 6.5..

 

[oxburger]

What's Quark?......

 

[toronar]

We don't see that many Quark files as around 2000-2004 anymore.
In this years you could dollars to donuts that open files would be Quark 4 with the occasional 5 and later 6. Nowadays it is either InDesign or PDF (or worse ... MS Office).

There are 3 "larger" customers that still use Quark; one has upgraded from 4 to 6, then to 7 and to 8 only a week after it was released. But the customer is not very happy with the constant troubles involving Quark's transparency flattener and considers switching to CS4. The others stayed with 6. For the most part I would say that Quark is dieing, slowly.

If I take a look at the volume of PDFs, it is always rising. Around 70% of our jobs arrive directly as PDFs; from these, at most 10% are made out of Quark, the rest is InDesign (>60%) and MS Office (20%).


Numbers for different Quark versions (estimates ):
1% Quark 3 (only one magazine every 2 months ... dang what would I give if I could kill that old G4 off the network that still runs OS 9 natively)
0% Quark 4 (no customers left that are still able to run Quark 4 / Classic)
0% Quark 5 (who bought that version anyway ...)
75% Quark 6 (first version with support for OS X, most customers upgraded to 6 but not further)
15% Quark 7 (the occasional "newcomer" and some poor agencies that are left with thousands of legacy files)
9% Quark 8 (one "large" customer and sometimes a new customer that forgot to send his perfectly valid PDFs instead)

 

[Lower Case]

Price reductions? They couldn't pay me to go back to Quark. It's obsolete.

 

[jbbbarr]

After using Qxp8 for a couple months it does seem to be ok but it is really nothing more than 7 with a new look. there is no real compelling reason to upgrade just as there is not much from ID CS3 to ID CS4, I prefer ID CS3 still and much more than any version of Quark. The only reason it is still around is because of a few stubborn agencies and legacy files that will eventually be replaced or reworked into ID files.

Quark had it's day now it's time to send it into retirement with the likes of Freehand.

 

[almaink]

Transparency killed Quark. Well Quarks idea of transparency and the fact that it still needs to use postscript to print. Flattened Quark PDF's have got to be the worst thing to deal with...

 

[Colorblind]

We are an agency and that's the ratio:

2007: Quark 7 90% InDesignCS3 10%
2009: Quark 7 less than 1% InDesignCS3-4 more than 99%

While I think Quark got what it deserves and InDesign is a superior product, Adobe's monopoly scares me a bit...

 

[mattbeals]

I have one European customer who uses Quark. But they now suggest that their customers upload PostScript or PDF to them instead of Quark. I have one other customer who is in the midst of a complete Quark to InDesign conversion. It's a long road for them though with all of their existing templates and jobs needing to be switched over. Other than that, they were the only Quark customer I've had in years. Quark has been dead for all intents and purposes in the commercial world since Quark and Adobe went native OS X years ago. Adobe did it first but Quark never caught up. You would think after all these years that they would have. How hard can it be to place a PDF and not screw it up? The saddest thing is that they are well aware of the problems and seemingly ignore them. Colorblind is right, an Adobe monopoly is not a good thing. Quark at least needs to feign enough interest to keep Adobe honest.

 

[geozinger]

I have one European customer who uses Quark. But they now suggest that their customers upload PostScript or PDF to them instead of Quark. I have one other customer who is in the midst of a complete Quark to InDesign conversion. It's a long road for them though with all of their existing templates and jobs needing to be switched over. Other than that, they were the only Quark customer I've had in years. Quark has been dead for all intents and purposes in the commercial world since Quark and Adobe went native OS X years ago. Adobe did it first but Quark never caught up. You would think after all these years that they would have. How hard can it be to place a PDF and not screw it up? The saddest thing is that they are well aware of the problems and seemingly ignore them. Colorblind is right, an Adobe monopoly is not a good thing. Quark at least needs to feign enough interest to keep Adobe honest.

We still use Quark, largely because we have a huge amount of legacy files. However, we have not upgraded to 8 yet, but mostly because of cost cutting issues. I have seen only one Q8 file since it was released, the agency that sent it to me received legacy Quark files from their customer and had no other way of dealing with the file (apparently). By the same token, I've only received three or four CS4 files, so it appears that the take rate on that upgrade isn't as large as you might believe, at least in my area.

Like everyone else on this board, I'm seeing an uptick in the receipt of PDF files, and the increase in files generated in Publisher (or other MS titles). Also, I'm greatly concerned about the lack of competition for Adobe products, particularly as Quark has receded from (or just ceded) the page-layout market. I've been playing with a shareware title (iPublisher) that is actually pretty useful for it's intended market (i.e. newsletters, ready for digital printing flyers, etc.) and actually pretty sophisticated for the price ($50 USD).

But with Adobe working on near hegemony for publishing we're almost completing the circle that desktop publishing broke in the 1980's, IMO. Of course, with the decline in print publishing, maybe our skills are no longer in the same level of demand that they once were.

 

[Dave Thornton]

We still use Quark as our primary layout app, mostly because it's what the users are most comfortable with; the version they usually default to is 6.5. I started working here four years ago and they were still in OS 9 and Quark 4; we moved to OS X & Quark 6.5, which has served us well for the most part becaus most of our work is one- to three-color flexo & offset, with fairly simple graphics. A good percentage of our work seems to be getting increasingly complex though, exceeding Quark's capabilities on a regular basis.

Some of the trouble we have creating pdf's from complex Quark files makes me want to migrate to InDesign, but it's still too unfamiliar for some. Plus we have a boatload of legacy jobs that were built in Quark and used for revisions, so it's more expedient to stick with Quark, but I contend we could save a lot of headaches by just making the jump. I'd say over 50% of incoming new jobs from customers are also built in Quark, and many of them want files back when we're done, so we're kinda stuck with it for now. One major customer recently upgraded to Quark 8, so we've upgraded our license, but it might be a while before 6.5 is left behind. The thing that might make the transition happen more rapidly is some of the issues we've seen with Quark 6.5 and OS 10.5. Rapidly losing hair on some of that...

 

[Vee]

I too receive a fair amount of Quark files still.
About 50/50 between Qk 6.5 & 7, no version 8 files to date. These are all for PI's & Med Guides. Although I did receive a pressure sensitive label and carton laid out in Quark this week....... ouch!
I completely moved the label over to Illustrator, and left he carton in Qk. Lovely vendor of mine said they could work with it.

All of our cartons (except the one mentioned above) are received in Illy + PDF. 95% of our PI's & Med Guides are in Quark. And the remaining 5% in PDF or INDD.

 

[Grnofslt]

We get very few art submissions actually in a native Quark file. That being said, we get many PDFs that were created from Quark documents. Ouch!!!! PDF's of quark documents wouldn't be so bad if our major service provider (makes our flexo mats) didn't want everything converted into an Illustrator file. We can't even send them InDesign files. Everything has to be either Illustrator, or .eps files with all text converted to outlines. Life is just so much fun… Ya Think?

 

[guru]

Quark is a live

Quark is a live

Its back...

They have really tried to lift there game. The best feature I have seen is the cross media function print web and interactive from one doc excellent. Also its well worth seeing there server side solutions.

Don't look at the app to replace indesign although it could but look at as another app to provide more solutions to a demanding industry.

 

[Criminy]

After using Qxp8 for a couple months it does seem to be ok but it is really nothing more than 7 with a new look. there is no real compelling reason to upgrade just as there is not much from ID CS3 to ID CS4, I prefer ID CS3 still and much more than any version of Quark. The only reason it is still around is because of a few stubborn agencies and legacy files that will eventually be replaced or reworked into ID files.

Quark had it's day now it's time to send it into retirement with the likes of Freehand.

Perfectly said! Unless they get with the program and can offer transparency flattening and reliable overprint previews like InDesign, Quark will go the way of the Dodo. Unfortunate, as I think some of its features are handy, and I learned how to do page layouts on Macs using Quark.

 

[Mark Tenga]

Quark's upgrade

Quark's upgrade

Hi,


I'm a new member here.

I run a commercial art studio in NYC and have not gotten a Quark file from any client in over a year.

All have switched to InDesign CS3 and I hope they don't jump to CS4 too soon. When they do, I'll have my Quark 8 upgrade money to use on CS4 instead.

The last time I upgraded Quark was for the 6 to 7 upgrade 2 years ago, partly because it was so cheap: I think it was $99, so I bought it for 3 of my Macs. But I've hardly used it. I like a lot of things about Quark, but I will not upgrade again unless I'm forced to do it. It seems that more of the experienced artists like me still have something good to say about Quark: maybe it's nostalgic. Most of the younger art directors we deal with don't want to know anything about Quark, it's IDCS3 for them.

I do agree with the other contributor that Adobe's monopoly in DTP is not a good thing; it lays the foundation for them to become lazy like Quark, and to keep focring unnecessary upgrades on us. Expensive upgrades.


Mark Tenga
Tenga's Studio, NYC.

 

[zoulas]

We recently went from OS9 and Quark 4.x to OS 10.5 and Quark 8.x. Overall happy with the exception of the standard early adopter issues. We have been using Quark since it ran on the Mac Classic. Its the devil we know, what more can I say.

 

[cjwworld]

We are very much like Dave's workflow. We use Qk 6.5 mainly because of people proficient on it. But on my side of the fence (Production) I still use ID on complicated 4-clr work.. Qk kills the files because of the transparency issue. So I work on the ad w/ ID. Most of our Commercial Work, we recieve 95% in PDF's. Some use ID CS4 which I couldn't miss with but have to insist on PDF's