InDesign or Quark Xpress? and other computer questions

[eviltiki]

Okay so I just got myself a new powerbook, because apple is silly with those loan deals. I still need to get the software *ouch* It's going to be a while before I can afford it and ideally I'd love to get both. I love Quark Xpress but I have a feeling that indesign will take over just on the basis that quark's programmers have been sitting on their ass for the past few years (come on still no carbonized version?) So the question is do you think InDesign will become the new king of page layout? At this point do you see studios switch over or will it just be a whatever your preference is issue?

What happened to adobe streamline? Is vectorizing bitmaps intergrated in Illustrator now? I know freehand did back in a way earlier version but I can't figure out how to do it in 10, any hints?

and on my lcd I get these erratic pixels that blink on and off around text with certain color schemes. white on black one of them at the moment. I think it might have to do with the memory in the graphics card, also I fiddled with the calibration of the lcd screen and it was fixed but then when the screen ran into other color combos it did it again.

[uncle charlie]

STreamline has been replaced by the autotrace tool in Freehand.. It rocks and is just as good as Streamline..

Quark is for secretaries.. No need to use it at all. Unless your like laying out a newspaper or magazine.. I use Free hand for everything, even my multipage marketing booklets for Disney I just finished.

God bless Freehand

[Bradley W. Zimmerman]

i have a vendetta against Quark. you got it right that their programmers have been sitting on their asses. stick w/ InDesign.

as for Streamline, the autotrace tool in Illustrator 8 doesn't quite cut it for me. haven't tried it on newer versions, but i trust charlie's word. at any rate, i like Streamline, and it's all over the P2P networks.

and BEWARE OF THE APPLE LOAN. it bleeds you. i still have $1.5k to go on my blue/white G3 i got 3 years ago. but then, i'm po' like kenny.

[Bradley W. Zimmerman]

oh wait - charlie digs freehand.

fuck you charlie. fuck you right in the ear.

[rotodesign]

Are there a lot of you using InDesign? I'm a Quark user, but I hate it -- their tech/product support is atrocious. I haven't upgraded from 4 to 5, mostly 'cause instead of fixing what's wrong with the program Quark 5 seems to have added the dubious "feature" of turning your print pages to web pages. And it's still not OSX friendly. That and a lot of pre-press places I've worked with don't even like Quark 4 because of weird trapping problems. So is InDesign any good?

[Finch]

We are just starting to look into this here where I work and InDesign does appear to have some neat features - such as in v2.0 you can layer colors in a similar manner as PhotoShop, which is pretty nifty.

[jasoncross]

InDesign is not bad at all. It Has some cool spell checking and you can run the proggy with a book full of info in it. I like it. Quark is a turd sponge. Thank god Quark did not buy Adobe back in 1996, that would have been the coming of hell (they did actually attempt a stock buy out for majority ownership...Adobe properly flew them the finger)

[rotodesign]

How's cross-platform compatibility? That is, when I open an old QXP document in InDesign, will it be all screwed up? And have you had any pre-press trouble (besides them not having the program)?

[gooch]

There's a special place in Hell for the inventors of Quark Xpress.

[Finch]

Man - I've got to say that I'm quite surprised at the response on this topic. Go ahead and boo and hiss, but I work on the PC platform, primarily using PageMaker for page layout and I thought EVERYONE was into Quark Xpress - at least that was the impression that I've been given over the last few years.

I can't speak to the transferral of Quark documents in InDesign, but for the most part in the VERY limited tests I've done on transferring PageMaker documents to InDesign, there was an issue with type reflowing a bit, but other than that the basic layout was kept intact.

As far as pre-press goes, the vendors we've been talking to have said that if the customers are using InDesign, they'll support it. At last check, there just hadn't been many people using InDesign locally though.