. The trouble with Quark actually began long before I was able to buy a copy. I’m in charge of the desktop publishing labs at The Savannah College of Art and Design, and I had tried to contact Quark for a year to find out about their educational sales policies. We had been teaching with PageMaker and DesignStudio, and felt that we should consider adding QuarkXPress to our curriculum. Most companies have “lab packs” which they sell to educational institutions at steep discounts, and that is what I wanted information on. My letters to the company had gone unanswered. I had our Apple educational rep call and write. I had even made a face-to-face request to a Quark regional rep to please get me the information. Same result (no result).
$ P
. That was just the beginning of the trouble with Quark. When I finally got a response from a Quark rep, it was on America Online. The answer was really pretty simple considering the amount of time I had spent obtaining it. The answer was, “Contact your local Quark dealer.” So I did.
P
. He was able to get through to them. Here’s what they told him: “Send us a page from your catalog showing that you really use XPress for educational purposes.” Is this catch-22 or what? Remember that we had so far been unable to buy an educational copy of the program!
d `
. When Quark finally sent us the paperwork, an “affidavit” was included which asked for my signature and my department head’s. This affidavit was mainly a licensing agreement in which we agree not to make unauthorized copies—no problem. The good part was that we were supposed to fill in the serial numbers of the programs that we hadn’t bought yet!
. I’m not making this up.
Ê @
. We sent them a copy of our new 4-color, 122 page catalog (produced entirely in DesignStudio), showing that we teach all major DTP programs except Quark. And that we run around 600 students through our DTP lab every year.
˘ @
. Anyhow, we ordered 45 copies of XPress. It is copy-protected. I bet you thought we were beyond that, didn’t you? Here’s the rub; they only copy-protect lab packs for schools. One of their reps stated that the company doesn’t trust students.
, P
. The form of copy protection they use is network serialization, meaning that two copies with the same serial number will not run on a network. What it also means is that XPress is pretty much useless on a network/server. It also means that it is a royal pain to install or update the program.
6
. And the trouble with Quark didn’t stop there.
ˇˇ *
. Interface Problems? In Your Face!
≥ p
. I had encountered a problem importing styles from MacWrite II. If I imported text that had bold or italic styles added here and there and then I applied a Quark style to the text, all of the local formatting disappeared. I had to go back and manually re-apply the styles. This seemed obviously wrong to me, and I had not encountered this problem with other page layout software. Obviously, somebody at Quark could help me out.
ê
. I began by asking the Quark reps on America Online. I was assured that I must be doing something wrong, that they knew it would work. They gave me clear instructions on exactly how to proceed, but the problem remained. After several tries, I called the Quark tech support department. I explained the problem—and the history of the responses—and she assured me that she could give me a definitive answer. Just give her five minutes to find her copy of MacWrite, and she’d call me right back with instructions on how to make it work.
ô p
. Forty-five minutes later she called to say, “It doesn’t work.” She suggested that if I would just switch to Microsoft Word, everything would be fine. I told her that I couldn’t find Microsoft Word on the list of requirements on the Quark box. She said that I should define my styles in Word. I questioned the worth of Quark’s style sheets if they could only be efficiently defined in another program.
“ @
. (Incidentally, I later tried the same “solution” using Word instead of MacWrite II, and it still didn’t work. In fact, I’m still going back and manually reapplying local styles to my XPress documents.)
Q
. If you think that the trouble with Quark ended there, then keep reading!
ˇˇ
. Upgrade Time!
æ p
. Quark made some extensive and valuable changes when it brought out version 3.1, and we were looking forward to receiving it. We spent a long time looking forward to it, because it never came. Several of my students had received upgrades to their own personal copies, but they couldn’t really use them, because they would want to print their new docs in the lab, but version 3.1 was not backward compatible with the college’s version 3.0.
• p
. After several weeks of patient waiting, I finally called and carefully explained that we were an art college using XPress lab packs, but we had not received our upgrades. I was asked if I had sent in the registration cards. I replied that lab packs are supposed to be pre-registered, and that there were no registration cards supplied. He asked, “Oh, do you have a lab pack?” (I promise I am not making this up.)
® 0
. Once he understood (sic) the problem, he assured me that the upgrades would be on their way in no time at all. Several weeks later, two-thirds of them arrived.
Ü
. Two-thirds of an upgrade does us zero-thirds good, due to the compatibility problem mentioned earlier. Back to the telephone.
ê
. The friendly fellow on the other end of the line checked into the problem and verified that, in fact, only two of our three upgrade kits had shipped. He couldn’t imagine what the problem could be, but he assured me that it would be taken care of promptly. A week later, another friendly person told me exactly the same thing. When I called at the end of the third week, the fellow actually remembered me. He was very surprised that I had still not received the upgrades. (The sense of surprise was beginning to fade for me.)
P
. During this time, it became increasingly difficult to get through to Quark. On one particular day, after I had spent a total of 80 minutes on hold to Quark, I finally got through. I was told that there was no one there that day that could help me. Could I call back tomorrow?
˜ Ä
. Somewhere in here I tried the Quark rep on America Online again. I wrote a note explaining the problem. I actually received two responses to this note. (I couldn’t help but wonder if schizophrenia was in Quark’s job requirements.) One reply said that the problem would be checked into, and the other said that it was not his job and offered a telephone number to call for upgrade problems. (It seems they installed a special hotline just for people like me. I wonder how many of us there are?)
$ ê
. After another week went by with no upgrades, I called and asked to speak to someone in charge, someone in authority. (This was assuming a great deal.) After a couple of days of unanswered phone messages, I was able to speak to someone who claimed to actually be in charge. She was full of apologies, and she assured me that she would see that the upgrades were shipped “by about the middle of next week.” “Why not ship today?” I asked. “Ah, but you just don’t understand how we handle these procedures, Mr. Alley.” I wholeheartedly agreed.
% P
. Before she hung up, she remarked that we were nearly due for a review of our status as an educational institution. I assured her that we had not changed into a circus or bakery in the intervening weeks. She in turn assured me that it was no big deal; just some bureaucratic paperwork.
. Now I’m really worried.
! ê
. And the real trouble with Quark is that another two weeks have gone by, and I have still not received the upgrades. I do not want to characterize the character, intellect, or policies of Quark or its employees; the reader can draw his own conclusions. Every rep that I spoke to was very polite. But I have received messages from several other individuals who have had similar experiences with the company. The fact is that more and more design professionals are switching to QuarkXPress, perhaps in spite of the treatment they receive.
. Update: Well, the last batch of upgrades finally arrived. It’s too late to install it for this quarter, so another batch of students has missed out on learning about the new features. How do I explain this to them? I merely tell them about the trouble(s) with Quark.
. The preceding article might suggest that I have a bad taste in my mouth due to my experiences with Quark. I want to point out that most of my problems have been with the company, not the program. I’ve been using QuarkXPress for several months now, and I’ve come to have considerable respect for the program. The few quirks seem to be a fair trade-off for the extra power that XPress offers over the competition.
â `
. Apparently, a large hunk of the design community agrees, because Quark is attracting a growing portion of the professional design market. I suspect that PageMaker’s large market share has been due in part to the program’s ease of learning. A large measure of the success of the pop field of desktop publishing is that anybody can do it—even business executives and their secretaries.
@
. I recently read an article on the program in
. How
. magazine.
. How
. is a magazine for design professionals, not Mac enthusiasts. Its approach is quite different from what you’ll find in a Mac-specific hobby magazine such as
. Macworld.
$
. ---------------------------
é p
. For the past five years, Aldus and Quark, the two heavyweights in page-composition software, have been exchanging punches in the technological and marketing areas. Lately however, Quark has been landing heavier blows against long-time champ PageMaker, resulting in some PageMaker users defecting to the XPress camp. In fact, with the release of XPress 3.1, the fight may be close to over.
d
. Aldus sells more copies of PageMaker, but most of those sales go to non-design businesses.
k ‡
. If you previously rejected XPress because it was difficult to use, you’ll be surprised to learn that XPress has become much more PageMaker-like, just as PageMaker has begun adding XPress features such as a floating Control Palette that mimics a similar XPress tool (though without some of the same abilities to manipulate page elements). Right now, however, XPress has the fuller feature set: the best elements from PageMaker, the most useful XPress functions, and some outstanding new tools not available in other programs…Disappointed PageMaker users may end up waiting until version 5 before they see tools XPress users take for granted…QuarkXPress has mustered all the necessary tools in one program for just about any publication you want to build. It outshines PageMaker in almost all categories and continues to get substantially better with each new version.
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¨
. How, April, 1992
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¨
. -------------------------
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¬
. For those of you who might complain that DesignStudio has been left out of these proceedings, I hear and agree. It must be admitted, however, that DesignStudio (now Ready,Set,Go) is simply not in the running in the professional market. That market sadly does not include DesignStudio/Ready,Set,Go at this time. Letraset allowed a fine program to wither on the vine through neglect. The program has now reverted to Manhattan Graphics (the program’s originator), but it’s likely to be some time before the trend can be turned around. In fact, the most recent release of RSG is merely an attempt to correct some of the programming flaws introduced under Letraset’s ownership.
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