I didn't have any choice but to learn Quark back in my early days as a designer, since PageMaker just wasn't strong enough for top-level design, but I *always* hated its user interface (and while I never had to deal with them personally, their customer service has always been notoriously awful).

So when Adobe announced their "Quark killer," I was ecstatic. It took a couple of versions for InDesign to leap ahead, but leap ahead it did, at least in terms of delivering a truly user-friendly publishing system that was as powerful as the previous king of the hill. I switched to ID as soon as it was feasible and have never looked back.

I recently had to help a non-profit convert their entrenched newsletter files over to ID from Quark and was reminded of how, pardon my French, ass-backwards it still is. I recognize that some of the big publishing houses and service bureaus still work with it because of their own entrenched frameworks, but if I had to start using Quark again, I'd find a new career.

Bonnie Landau

Web Design & Marketing Expert, Landau Design

Posted on March 4, 2011

I second Whit's post. I also learned Quark early on in the late 80's when it first came out because Pagemaker was a joke. I was a Quark enthusiast until my Quark version got corrupted around 2004, and the customer service to try an fix it cost me at least 10 hours and still it wouldn't work. They are so paranoid about security, I couldn't ever get my Quark to work again, and I didn't want to waste anymore time.

I had a copy of InDesign but didn't want to have to spend a lot of time to learn it. A friend convinced me, so I switched, and I have never looked back. I won't say it's all intuitive, but it really isn't as complex as Quark. Also, it interfaces so well with Photoshop and Illustrator, and it's wonderful to have that ease between all 3 tools. And export to PDF presets are awesome! Never has preparing for print been such a breeze.

And like White also said, you can open Quark files in InDesign, so I've never had to worry about needing Quark again.

David Creamer

President, IDEAS Training

Posted on March 6, 2011

Just to clarify, you can open/convert Quark version 3 and 4 files directly with InDesign. Later versions of Quark need the Markzware plug-in for conversion.

I have a PDF on my website that compares InDesign, QuarkXPress, and FrameMaker features:
http://www.ideastraining.com/PDFs/SelectingDTPprogram_v2.pdf