[Eug]

Macworld: Review: Universal QuarkXPress gets a speed boost, but only on Intel Macs

The Universal QuarkXPress 7.01 makes up for much of the slowdown in version 7.0 on Intel Macs. The speedup on the Mac Pro is much higher than on the Mac mini, so users of the latest Macs will see the best performance. Compared to non-native XPress 6.5, XPress 7.01 is 19 percent faster on the Mac Pro but 38 percent slower on the Mac mini. On the two Intel Macs, XPress 7.01 is slower than InDesign CS2, by about 30 to 40 percent. XPress 7.01 is about 30 percent slower than version 7.0 on PowerPC Macs. As a percentage, the slowdown is slightly higher on a Power Mac G4 (32 percent) compared to a Power Mac G5 (30 percent). In all tests, XPress 7.01 is slower than XPress 6.5 and InDesign CS2—running at just a fifth to a half the speed of the others.

[Chuckit]

Good lord, Quark. Break out Shark once in a while.

[voodoo]

Good lord people.. knee-jerk attacks on Quark are so last decade.

Besides no major Adobe app is native. Have a row over that!

Adobe sucks man.

Wait.. someone is about to excuse Adobe.

V

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by voodoo

Good lord people.. knee-jerk attacks on Quark are so last decade.

Besides no major Adobe app is native. Have a row over that!

Your derail is rejected. Sorry. Adobe's release schedule has no impact on the fact that Quark just got significantly slower for no apparent reason.

[Landos Mustache]

Quark is run by a bunch of brain dead chimps so this comes as no surprise.

[Eug]

I remember saying last year that PowerPC was not dead, even though Apple was going Intel. I said that while most optimization efforts would be Intel-oriented and PowerPC performance may stagnate, at least PowerPC stuff wouldn't get significantly slower (with point upgrades at least).

Quark, ye proved me wrong!

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by voodoo

Good lord people.. knee-jerk attacks on Quark are so last decade.

Besides no major Adobe app is native. Have a row over that!

Adobe sucks man.

Wait.. someone is about to excuse Adobe.

V

Heh. Read again. Quark 7.0.1 a native app, is slower that In Design, a non-native app.

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Your derail is rejected. Sorry. Adobe's release schedule has no impact on the fact that Quark just got significantly slower for no apparent reason.

Derailing resumed:

Adobe sucks a lot and thanks to their laziness professionals have to keep using the PowerMacs for months to come just so they can keep up some imaginary product cycle instead of coming through for their Mac customers.

Did you notice the 100% slowdown of Photoshop when you run it on Intel Macs? For no apparent reason..

V

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

Heh. Read again. Quark 7.0.1 a native app, is slower that In Design, a non-native app.

Read again? It's not like the meaning will change after reading it again. I'm not dislexic like I guess you are - since you think re-reading changes anything

In the future, don't suggest to people that they re-read anything when it is you who misunderstand. Everything I wrote in my first post is true.

Re-read it

V

[Landos Mustache]

Originally Posted by Eug

I remember saying last year that PowerPC was not dead, even though Apple was going Intel.

Absolutely. Pretty much zero design firms are buying Intel machines just because of photoshop. In fact they are hunting around to buy out the remaining PPC machines and rather even buy old used ones over a new Mac Pro.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by voodoo

Derailing resumed

Indeed.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by voodoo

Read again? It's not like the meaning will change after reading it again. I'm not dislexic like I guess you are - since you think re-reading changes anything

In the future, don't suggest to people that they re-read anything when it is you who misunderstand. Everything I wrote in my first post is true.

Re-read it

V

Look any attack on Quark is rightly justified. After years of downright customer hostility they promised to clean up their act and yet they can't even make their bloated piece of junk compare to an Adobe app running in Rosetta. Still think any attack on Quark is unjustified?

[Landos Mustache]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

Look any attack on Quark is rightly justified. After years of downright customer hostility they promised to clean up their act and yet they can't even make their bloated piece of junk compare to an Adobe app running in Rosetta. Still think any attack on Quark is unjustified?

For some reason Quark has its fanboys. I think most of it comes from designers have used it for so long the commands are second nature so when you go to InDesign and it is different or missing some obscure feature they immediately hate it as the learning curve makes them look dumb.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Landos Mustache

For some reason Quark has its fanboys. I think most of it comes from designers have used it for so long the commands are second nature so when you go to InDesign and it is different or missing some obscure feature they immediately hate it as the learning curve makes them look dumb.

Quark has a legion of supporters because:

1) It works well;
2) It's still better than ID for serious pre press work;
3) It's faster than ID, and requires less memory, on the same hardware;
4) It's superior for long document production;
5) ID has the worst possible interface for a desktop publishing program I could imagine.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

It's faster than ID

LOL

[Landos Mustache]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

Quark has a legion of supporters because:

1) It works well;
2) It's still better than ID for serious pre press work;
3) It's faster than ID, and requires less memory, on the same hardware;
4) It's superior for long document production;
5) ID has the worst possible interface for a desktop publishing program I could imagine.

Oh oh, do me a favor send an email too all those giant American magazines that switched to Indesign 2 years ago where you could see a dramatic change in the magazine quality for the better. I guess they also got their number wrong when they mentioned how much time and money using ID saves.

Ooops to them.

[Eug]

Regardless if ID is better than Quark or if Quark is better than ID, I just find it shocking that a small point update can shave 1/3rd of the overall performance off the app. There's just something wrong with this picture.

[Landos Mustache]

Originally Posted by Eug

Regardless if ID is better than Quark or if Quark is better than ID, I just find it shocking that a small point update can shave 1/3rd of the overall performance off the app. There's just something wrong with this picture.

Exactly. Not to mention the "new graphics engine" that came in 7.0 was slower than the one in 6.

End of story.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Landos Mustache

Exactly. Not to mention the "new graphics engine" that came in 7.0 was slower than the one in 6.

That's because it actually makes an attempt at accurately representing the text now. I don't know if you use Quark much, but the text engine before 7.0 was absolutely wretched. I teach students how to use Quark at a local college, and every single one is confused at some point by the fact that their text will sometimes look italic (or not) regardless of whether it actually is italic.

[greenamp]

How the hell do you benchmark a page layout program? (sarcastic)

[- - e r i k - -]

Translation

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

Quark has a legion of supporters because:

1) It works well;

1) I've worked with it for many years and I'm used to it.

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

2) It's still better than ID for serious pre press work;

2) …except if your pre press work requires serious typography.

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

3) It's faster than ID, and requires less memory, on the same hardware;

3) I smoke crack.

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

4) It's superior for long document production;

4) … in my personal opinion

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

5) ID has the worst possible interface for a desktop publishing program I could imagine.

5) See number one. I also happen to like the archaic ways that Quark does things, it reminds me of System 6, when computing was safe and black and white.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

That's because it actually makes an attempt at accurately representing the text now. I don't know if you use Quark much, but the text engine before 7.0 was absolutely wretched. I teach students how to use Quark at a local college, and every single one is confused at some point by the fact that their text will sometimes look italic (or not) regardless of whether it actually is italic.

I used it 5 days a week for 3 years creating a bi-weekly magazine.

Yes the old text method looked horrible. So 7 made it the way it is expected to work from what should have been 1.0. 10 years later a few drop shadows and not making something look like crap shouldn't be 30% slower.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Landos Mustache

Oh oh, do me a favor send an email too all those giant American magazines that switched to Indesign 2 years ago where you could see a dramatic change in the magazine quality for the better. I guess they also got their number wrong when they mentioned how much time and money using ID saves.

Ooops to them.

Why should I write to them? I work for some of them. You seem to assume I don't know what I'm talking about. I've been in the industry for 15 years and have been doing print work since the time of stat cams and proportion wheels. ID has some great features, but it's slow, overly complicated and has a horrible interface.

There's a reason people still talk about Quark: it's still the most widely used dtp/pre press program out there. And just because someone prefers Quark doesn't mean they're a 'fanboi'. Come back and post when you've trapped four color artwork by hand.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

2) …except if your pre press work requires serious typography.

I haven't found ID's type handling to be any better than Quark's. Different, yes, but not better. And I miss my custom kerning tables.

3) I smoke crack.

ID CS2 requires a dual processor machine and a gig of RAM dedicated to CS2 to run acceptably, and even with that it begins to drag on long documents. Quark will run fine on a single processor machine with half the RAM.

4) … in my personal opinion

ID begins to seriously drag it the document gets longer than 40 or 50 pages. That's a problem with 200+ page financial products.

5) See number one. I also happen to like the archaic ways that Quark does things, it reminds me of System 6, when computing was safe and black and white.

I disagree. ID has the same problem as Pagemaker. It was designed by people who were designers first and type nerds second. Quark was designed by people who came up through the business using dedicated typesetting terminals, which is why it has such a minimalistic interface and features like Xpress Tags. That's why, if I'm doing seriously complicated type work, I prefer Quark.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

ID has some great features, but it's slow

Did you even read this thread? The point of the OP was that Quark is now slower than InDesign even when InDesign is running in emulation.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

I haven't found ID's type handling to be any better than Quark's. Different, yes, but not better. And I miss my custom kerning tables.

I was taught typography by one of the great masters in typography who have been around since movable (lead) type. He said that before InDesign computers couldn't do anything like what he'd been able to do manually before with such ease. Quark isn't even close (even with it's one benefit - the custom kerning tables).

[Mastrap]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

ID CS2 requires a dual processor machine and a gig of RAM dedicated to CS2 to run acceptably, and even with that it begins to drag on long documents. Quark will run fine on a single processor machine with half the RAM.

ID begins to seriously drag it the document gets longer than 40 or 50 pages. That's a problem with 200+ page financial products.

We routinely produce books of 200+ pages, often 300+, sometimes 400 and 500+. ID is running on single processor 1.8 G5s. We have never experienced any of the issues described by you. I am not trying to be controversial, I just can't say that I agree with you at all. InDesign runs fast and without hiccups. Documents are opened, saved and moved without trouble. PDF files are beautiful and without fault.

InDesign makes sense for us from a commercial and quality point of view. I love the close integration with both PhotoShop and Illustrator. I am also amazed how anybody can say that the interface is confusing. The tabbed menus work beautifully.

[Chuckit]

I sometimes have difficulty remembering which friggin' palette an option is in if I haven't used InDesign in a while.

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

Quark has a legion of supporters because:

1) It works well;
2) It's still better than ID for serious pre press work;
3) It's faster than ID, and requires less memory, on the same hardware;
4) It's superior for long document production;
5) ID has the worst possible interface for a desktop publishing program I could imagine.

Quoted for truth

I couldn't care less how they run their company, as long as they continue making that kick-ass layout app, then I'm fine with them.

All points by Don Pickett are 100% on target.

V

[- - e r i k - -]

No they are not. Especially when it comes to speed.

Seriously. I've been using Quark since version 2 back in the early nineties. Any qualms about InDesign are resistance to change. And there sure is a lot of it out there.

[Mastrap]

Originally Posted by voodoo

Quoted for truth

I couldn't care less how they run their company, as long as they continue making that kick-ass layout app, then I'm fine with them.

All points by Don Pickett are 100% on target.

V

Did you read my post? My experience is very different from Don's. I agree with Erik. I too used Quark for years before switching to ID - in my opinion ID is superior in every way.

[chris v]

Originally Posted by Mastrap

We routinely produce books of 200+ pages, often 300+, sometimes 400 and 500+. ID is running on single processor 1.8 G5s. We have never experienced any of the issues described by you. I am not trying to be controversial, I just can't say that I agree with you at all. InDesign runs fast and without hiccups. Documents are opened, saved and moved without trouble. PDF files are beautiful and without fault.

InDesign makes sense for us from a commercial and quality point of view. I love the close integration with both PhotoShop and Illustrator. I am also amazed how anybody can say that the interface is confusing. The tabbed menus work beautifully.

Word. I just finished producing a 28 page magazine with over 30 300 dpi tiffs interspersed throughout. I was able to leave the images on full resolution with nary a stutter. I wouldn't dream of trying that in Quark.

I have to keep Quark up to date at work, as we recieve Quark files from clients, but for creation, I've long-since switched to ID, & I'd been with Quark since '94.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

I was taught typography by one of the great masters in typography who have been around since movable (lead) type. He said that before InDesign computers couldn't do anything like what he'd been able to do manually before with such ease. Quark isn't even close (even with it's one benefit - the custom kerning tables).

I haven't had that experience. I began working in printing plants before when the industry was making the transition to full digital, so I worked with manual prep, manual trapping, and all that jazz. So, my experience with all that (and all the stuff I've done since then) is that there isn't anything ID can do which I can't do in Quark.

I don't think either one of us is right.I guess our experiences are just different, is all.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Mastrap

We routinely produce books of 200+ pages, often 300+, sometimes 400 and 500+. ID is running on single processor 1.8 G5s. We have never experienced any of the issues described by you. I am not trying to be controversial, I just can't say that I agree with you at all. InDesign runs fast and without hiccups. Documents are opened, saved and moved without trouble. PDF files are beautiful and without fault.

InDesign makes sense for us from a commercial and quality point of view. I love the close integration with both PhotoShop and Illustrator. I am also amazed how anybody can say that the interface is confusing. The tabbed menus work beautifully.

Inneresting: my experience is completely different. Two years ago I worked with one of the first big design firms in NYC to switch to ID during their annual report season and was amazed at how slow ID was on a dual 800 MHz G4. I would scroll down a few spreads and watch as ID drew the page elements in one at a time. Quark flew by comparison.

A few months ago I was working in a big financial house, using ID2. On a single 1.8 G5 with a gig of RAM I saw the same thing: incredibly slow screen redraw, much slowness scrolling between pages, etc. When my machine was replaced by a dual 2.0 with 3 gigs of RAM, ID2 ran much better. I asked the IT people about it and they said that everyone who worked there had noticed the same thing, namely that the upgrade from ID to ID2 had made things much slower and required them to put more RAM in the machines.

As to the interface, lemme do it quickly, as I have take a shower and grab some dinner. All of Quark's keyboard shortcuts are non-desctructive. In other words, to switch from the item tool to the content tool I use option-tab. In ID, to switch to the pen tool I have to use the "P" key. The problem is that, if I'm in an active text box that means I either have to 1) command click outside the text box and then hit "P" or 2) I have to take my hand off the keyboard and use the mouse to select the pen tool. This is slower than Quark, in which I would just option-tab until I had the tool I wanted, and something I find amazing in a program in which text features heavily. It is the same thing for something simple like changing space before. I Quark I do an Shift-Apple-F, option-tab twice, enter the value and hit return. In ID, if the Paragraph formatting pallette is visible there is no keyboard shortcut to get it active: I have to stop and use the mouse to select it or hit the keyboard shortcut twice, once to hide it and once to show it. Once again it slows me down.

This may seem like a minor thing, but the work I do is very text heavy: thousands and thousands of characters. I also come from a background heavy with typography. The tiny slowdowns caused by ID's interface really add up over the course of days of client edits to these text-heavy documents. I can fly in Quark. After years of using ID I have found that it's interface is inexplicably cumbersome and slow. It may be great for designers, but for hardcore production people it's like trying to write with boxing gloves.

I don't hate ID. In fact, I'm program (and platform) agnostic. I use whatever gets the job done and whatever the client wants me to use. But I am not blind to ID's many shortcomings, and I do not feel that the advantages it has over Quark (and there definitely are some) are enough to undergird the 'Quark sucks! ID rox!' comments I see sometimes. There's a reason that, despite all of Adobe's efforts, Quark is still alive and well: it's a great tool for the jobs it is required to do. ID can be a great tool, too, but I don't believe it is a better one. More bells and whistles perhaps, and with some really great features in there, but not the bestest DTP program evah, as some people will tell me.

If you're really bored, I did a much longer and more involved post about my problem's with ID's interface a while ago, in another thread like this one.

Gotta go shower, get some Chinese and watch The Wire

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

No they are not. Especially when it comes to speed.

Seriously. I've been using Quark since version 2 back in the early nineties. Any qualms about InDesign are resistance to change. And there sure is a lot of it out there.

I remember Quark 2. I also remember Illustrator 88, Pagemaker 3 and Photoshop 1.0, proportion wheels waxers and $20,000 laser printers.. Believe it or not, it's nor resistance to change. If I thought ID was really superior I would chuck Quark in a minute, but just don't think ID is better all around.

[chris v]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

I remember Quark 2. I also remember Illustrator 88, Pagemaker 3 and Photoshop 1.0, proportion wheels waxers and $20,000 laser printers.. Believe it or not, it's nor resistance to change. If I thought ID was really superior I would chuck Quark in a minute, but just don't think ID is better all around.

There's nothing like having to drive to the art store because you ran out of presstype 24 point Helvetica h's and f's.

And there's nothing like trying to keep a silkscreen from moireing when the artist has turned all his little scraps of zip-a-tone at whatever angle he could to make them fit the illustration.

You know what's sad? I had a $30,000.00 DS America copy camera with process filters, a 40x50 backlit artboard, pin registration, 26x36 film back & 16%-2000% lenses. When we moved the shop last December, I couldn't give it away. It sat unused for over 2 years, and I finallly had to pay someone to haul it to the dump.

Every once in a while, I'll see a chunk of amberlith & get kinda misty-eyed.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by chris v

There's nothing like having to drive to the art store because you ran out of presstype 24 point Helvetica h's and f's.

And there's nothing like trying to keep a silkscreen from moireing when the artist has turned all his little scraps of zip-a-tone at whatever angle he could to make them fit the illustration.

You know what's sad? I had a $30,000.00 DS America copy camera with process filters, a 40x50 backlit artboard, pin registration, 26x36 film back & 16%-2000% lenses. When we moved the shop last December, I couldn't give it away. It sat unused for over 2 years, and I finallly had to pay someone to haul it to the dump.

Every once in a while, I'll see a chunk of amberlith & get kinda misty-eyed.

I used to work with a guy who owned a little type/pre-press shop. Right before postscript and the Mac changed typography forever, he bought an $80,000 dedicated typesetting system. Took him years to pay off that debt. . .

[chris v]

Originally Posted by Don Pickett

I used to work with a guy who owned a little type/pre-press shop. Right before postscript and the Mac changed typography forever, he bought an $80,000 dedicated typesetting system. Took him years to pay off that debt. . .

Ouch. We used a shop like that for about a year until... yup, we bought a Mac.

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by chris v

Ouch. We used a shop like that for about a year until... yup, we bought a Mac.

He saw the writing on the wall and went out and bought a Mac, which saved his business. And, as a result he now knows more about Postscript than anyone this side of Adobe. But talk aboutcher bad timing. . .

[- - e r i k - -]

Haha. This thread quickly turned into a reminiscing thread for old timers about the DTP revolution. My mother had one of those copy cameras and I grew up with the lovely press-type kits that she had drawerfulls of. She changed over to Amigas for a brief period and then to Macs. We also had Illustrator 88, Photoshop 1.0 and Aldus PageMaker

[Dakar]

Ah, PageMaker. A friend and I spent hours in the schools MacLab painstakingly duplicating a report card using PageMaker. You may speculate as to why we would do such a thing...

[xi_hyperon]

Originally Posted by chris v

Every once in a while, I'll see a chunk of amberlith & get kinda misty-eyed.

I remember very clearly all the hours spent cutting amberlith with an exacto, never cutting outside the bounds of inklines drawn with my rapidograph pens. Fun times!

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Dakar

Ah, PageMaker. A friend and I spent hours in the schools MacLab painstakingly duplicating a report card using PageMaker. You may speculate as to why we would do such a thing...

I actually Photoshopped up a very realistic looking driver's license, but in 1990 there was no cheap color printing technology available to me. I remember being amazed at how easy it was to cut and paste my age from 18 to 21.

[chris v]

Originally Posted by Dakar

Ah, PageMaker. A friend and I spent hours in the schools MacLab painstakingly duplicating a report card using PageMaker. You may speculate as to why we would do such a thing...

Just think if you'd put all those hours into painstakingly studying to get good grades.

But Pagemaker: Blech.

[Eug]

So, anyone know why Quark got slower?

[- - e r i k - -]

Does anyone know why the chicken crossed the road?

[Eug]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

Does anyone know why the chicken crossed the road?

Yes. It's common knowledge.

However, not many seem to know why Quark got slower after the update.

[- - e r i k - -]

Maybe, despit of all their promises to get their sh*t together, Quark still can't deliver.

[Mastrap]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

Does anyone know why the chicken crossed the road?

Hemingway: "To die. In the rain. Alone."

[Don Pickett]

Originally Posted by Eug

So, anyone know why Quark got slower?

Has anyone stuck Little Snitch on there to see if it's phoning home?