I have been using QuarkXPres 5 years ago and have recently switched to Adobe Indesign. Don't get me wrong, QuarkXPres is a professional level program that can handle desktop publishing sufficiently. It has a lot of nice features that makes desktop publishing quick and painless.

The Good

• Master page templates: Allows you to create a component, like text or graphics, and have the program automatically position it at the same place of all predefined pages. This saves you a huge amount of time repeating a process especially if you're doing a 100 page book.

• Page arrangement: You can view your publication either as single pages, or facing each other like a normal printed book. This allows you to run a text, photo or other elements across 2 pages without having to cut the element in half.

• Text handling: You can basically manipulate text any way you want. Aside from the standard left, right and center alignment, you can have it flow around graphics, around circles and on a variety of shapes imaginable. I find this especially useful in a graphics heavy publications wherein pages are limited and I have to squeeze in the text into small, irregular spaces. This prevents the text from overlapping with photos or graphics components that may have the same color or shading as the text.

• Color management: Matches what you see in the monitor from what you get from the actual printing. A lot of times what you see in the monitor as red comes out as orange-pink with the printer. QuarkXPres eliminates this horror by including industry standard color management system. But note you'll also have to calibrate your monitor (hardware) properly.

• Language: Supports multiple languages / characters like German, and non-roman encoding like Japanese and Chinese.

• Element management check: Tells you when a link to a photo is missing or needs updating. Also tells you if a font is missing. You can also select a font used within the pages and have the software automatically replace it with another font throughout the entire publication saving you the tedious process of having to go through the entire publication and changing the font page by page.

The Bad

• High / low resolution preview: Without a third party extension, you can only view low resolution photo preview. This is really bad especially if you need a certain degree of precision in text or graphics placement. It's okay if you're doing a newsletter, a newspaper, or a book where graphics are minimal. But if you're making a catalog, then it's a big disadvantage.

• Language incompatibility: Opening a Quark file encoded in German for example is not possible if you're using English system. The entire file won't open. We ran into this problem when one of our German clients sent us their catalog in Quark for translation to English. This despite installing German support into the computer.

• PDF export: For QuarkXPres version 4.0 and below - you cannot convert your file into PDF directly. What we do is first, convert each page into EPS format, and then use Adobe distiller to convert to PDF. This roundabout process not only takes up a huge amount of space in your hard drive for the EPS files, it also wastes a substantial amount of time for the extra conversion process. Aside from that, you'll need Adobe Acrobat to arrange the PDF files into a book form (facing pages). Version 4.1 partially resolves this problem but your control over saving into PDF is not as efficient and as deep as that offered by Adobe Indesign.

Conclusion

Overall, QuarkXPres is a decent program which is surpassed by Adobe Indesign. The only advantage of QuarkXPres over Indesign is it's faster, less resource hungry and more stable. But for my needs, QuarkXPres' advantages is overshadowed by its disadvantages, and this is addressed by Adobe with their Indesign software, which makes QuarkXPres' omissions even more glaring. It's highly recommended for those who need a desktop publisher for making books, newsletters and other straightforward publications where graphics element are light. But for graphics-heavy publications, I would prefer Adobe's alternative.



Recommended: Yes