[art_director]

the archiving i'm getting with quark 5 under jaguar is a complete fookin' pain in the arse. i'm trying to design a 50+ page book and this is driving me mad.

please refrain from telling me "hey, why don't you upgrade to v.6." that would be an even bigger inconvenience because all my clients are running quark v.4 or id2. if i want to give files to me clients from v.6 i need to save down to v.5, then down to v.4. HOW FOOKIN' STUPID IS THAT???

thank you for allowing me a forum to vent my frustration with quarkBLOWSxpress.

[himself]

Originally posted by art_director:
the archiving i'm getting with quark 5 under jaguar is a complete fookin' pain in the arse. i'm trying to design a 50+ page book and this is driving me mad.

please refrain from telling me "hey, why don't you upgrade to v.6." that would be an even bigger inconvenience because all my clients are running quark v.4 or id2. if i want to give files to me clients from v.6 i need to save down to v.5, then down to v.4. HOW FOOKIN' STUPID IS THAT???

thank you for allowing me a forum to vent my frustration with quarkBLOWSxpress.

Heh, I'd suggest downgrading to Quark Xpress 4, but maybe it doesn't have the feature[s] you require...

[godzookie2k]

thats funny, look at my cold day in hell:

[art_director]

bummer, zookie.

the file for the 75-page book i'm doing (client added content) somehow became corrupt. quark v.5 seems to do that a hell of a lot. lucky for me i'm anal about backing up my bidness and only lost a half day of work.

hey zookie, you use quark v.6 yet? from what i've read it's no great shakes. that your experience?

himself, thanks for the thought but v.4 has the same issue under classic - or so i'm told. in addition, i went legit on all my software a couple years ago and bought v.5 but do not have a license for v.4.

[godzookie2k]

Not much experience with it a/d, unfortunately our office is going through bugeting hoo hah and only god knows if we'll get it anytime soon, much less make our ramp up to osx. Then again, I'm also being phased out of our magazine side and taking over our web development, so rants from me on quark vs indesign might start to ebb from now on. That all being said I messed with the demo a bit, it was nice to have the multitasking that X gives me, yet having the same. old. quark. I also don't really use alot of the new features. I could very easily be sat in front of Quark 3 and do my job just peachy, so who knows. I'm glad they didn't change the interface and I"m eager to play with the new tools, but I haven't gotten there yet. I've heard of Quark 5 corruption errors too, heck same thing happens every now and then with 4. I just save often and set quark to make backup iterations (5) for me when I save. (actually I wish Adobe software could be set to do that, or final cut for that matter)

[art_director]

yep. v.5 may have just roached my ENTIRE 75 PAGE FILE.

so much for quark saving time, huh?

[art_director]

btw...

i saved a backup and it appears to be fooked as well.

how did it happen? why trying to save down to v.4 so my client could print the file on her end.

why did she need the q file? because the pdf i made with q v.5 was also corrupt.

gee, why don't i buy v.6 so i can save to v.5 then save to v.4 from v.5. that way i'll completely ruin my workflow for a suckass company like quark.

[art_director]

can you tell i'm EXTREMELY PISSED? guess that's because i'm gonna have to stay up all night rebuilding this file so i can make my deadline.

quark supporters take note of this pain. if you've used this app for more than ten minutes you know how it screws files.

[godzookie2k]

yeah I know man, thats a fookin bitch...

[godzookie2k]

*hums "you are not alonnnnneeee"*

[art_director]

blows donkey nuts.

[chris.p]

It would seem that 10.3 resolves the redraw issues with Q4 (and sp presumably with 5) - as for the corrupting of files- thats awful. Are you working from a network disk? it rogers files according to Quark.

Or it may be a corrupted image or font file- try removing the images folder, and deactivate the fonts, and see if you can open it like that- it might save you a bit of work if you are lucky.

Good luck!

Chris

[art_director]

chris,

i appreciate your suggestions for my quark woes.

that said i've been using this effing program for over a decade. it sucked when i started using it and it sucks today. problem is the company refuses to fix diddly so long as they get their fookin' $900 / copy.

greed, baby, greed. that's all i have to say.

to hell with quark.

[bmmp]

I'm slightly compelled to disagree with you mighty art_director.
(much respect).

If you were to compare the business practises of Quark and Adobe, I think you can faithfully say Quark is the lesser to two evils.

I've meet several programmers from Quark and taken courses from them. They dont fold under the pressures of their investors and maintain their interface because of their commitment to prepress production houses, from the very first Quark to the most recent.

but, Quark is not without it's own set of problems, I concede.
Often unstable, remarkably featureless, and slow to adjust to improvements.

I still have my first copy of quark 1 on floppy disk, and cant recall ever having a corrupted Quark file, but I'm sure its possible when the right conditions are met.

hope you met your deadline, sire.

-bmmp

[art_director]

bmmp,

never a corrupt file with quark? how i wish i had your luck.

i use quark every day and have for the past decade. many, many times i've been reduced to a quivering freak because of the stress induced by quark corrupting files. that said, i do some heavy duty stuff and create large files, not usually production stuff (i leave that to my pre-press pros) but intensive design work.

i agree that adobe is a slave to her investors. that said they make a fine suite of design apps. they have their faults as does quark.

when it comes to quark i have a love hate relationship. as you know, it's the industry standard. i know the app inside and out (from a design viewpoint, i'm not a pre-press guru). i can build files as fast or faster than most using the app. it has many attributes i love and a healthy dose of them i despise. their customer service is the worst in the business and they do not listen to their core consumers.

what about in design?

to be painfully honest, i do not use it for my work. i simply cannot afford the time to learn the app right now – i've been crunching on a HUGE project since january of this year and won't be done until sometime next summer. i'm certain many would agree that's not the right time to incorporate a new app into your workflow.

what can quark do?

for starters, they can listen to us, their customers. give us the features and functionality we want. they can also get some customer service folk who actually know, understand and use the app. finally, they can work with us on the version limitations – specifically, they can allow v.6 to save down to v.4. if i could do that i would have bought it (v.6) when it came out. until they do that or my clients upgrade to v.5 or v.6 i won't waste my money.

sorry, i'm rambling...that's what happens when you wait for stuff to print.

btw, thanks for the the goodluck on my deadline. i rebuilt everything in time but now i need to print the bugger. well, that and get some sleep.

[JacobyO]

I ran a prepress shop for 8yrs and have spent the last 2.5yrs as a designer and production person for a small graphic design firm in the Chicago area.
That being said, there are a few issues that are frustrating with the current Quark state.

1. The reason that Quark is the industry standard is because it has a simple purpose. By that I mean that they haven't tried to incorporate any of the bells and whistles that the other apps have such as transparency, illustration, or any of the operations that are otherwise accomplished by Illustrator or Photoshop. The simplistic postscript makes it a very stable program for sending to RIPs. Until Quark decides to make their program overweighted with features like InDesign it will remain the choice of PrePress proffessionals.

2. Quark the company could care less about their customers because they have the worst service of any company I have ever worked with. They are extremely overpriced. They obviously spend all of their programming energy on figuring out a way to make it harder for people to hack the software. I have waaaaay too many stories at this point as to the blatant neglect of their operation.

3. I would love to see InDesign become more popular with the prepress industry but I can't see that happening until everybody switches and we force the printers to buy and use it.

In the meantime, I am using Q6 and it is much more stable than running 5 or earlier in classic. Classic was the largest reason that my computer never ran right. For those that can't afford copies for every computer can rest assured that there will be a hack eventually. There always is.

[art_director]

Originally posted by JacobyO:
I ran a prepress shop for 8yrs and have spent the last 2.5yrs as a designer and production person for a small graphic design firm in the Chicago area.
That being said, there are a few issues that are frustrating with the current Quark state.

1. The reason that Quark is the industry standard is because it has a simple purpose. By that I mean that they haven't tried to incorporate any of the bells and whistles that the other apps have such as transparency, illustration, or any of the operations that are otherwise accomplished by Illustrator or Photoshop. The simplistic postscript makes it a very stable program for sending to RIPs. Until Quark decides to make their program overweighted with features like InDesign it will remain the choice of PrePress proffessionals.

2. Quark the company could care less about their customers because they have the worst service of any company I have ever worked with. They are extremely overpriced. They obviously spend all of their programming energy on figuring out a way to make it harder for people to hack the software. I have waaaaay too many stories at this point as to the blatant neglect of their operation.

3. I would love to see InDesign become more popular with the prepress industry but I can't see that happening until everybody switches and we force the printers to buy and use it.

In the meantime, I am using Q6 and it is much more stable than running 5 or earlier in classic. Classic was the largest reason that my computer never ran right. For those that can't afford copies for every computer can rest assured that there will be a hack eventually. There always is.

interesting, in minneapolis many printers feel id is a step in the right direction.

yep, quark's customer service is the worst in the biz.

q.v.6 is useless to me. well, i could use it but why create more work for myself? i already have to save down to q.v.4 from q.v.5. going to q.v.6 would just add another inconvenience. i should add that the new *features* do not justify the expense.

[JacobyO]

While I absolutely agree that ID is a step in the right direction it's still not there.

The only reason that we purchased Q6 is because Q5 was causing too many problems with the system and fonts between OSX and Classic. Since switching the computers have been rock solid. If you are looking for new features then Quark has never been the answer since it has only really added a couple useful features since v2.

[theolein]

Bmmp knows Quark programmers? Quark moved it's entire coding from Denver to India a couple of years ago, which was the main reason it took so damn long for QX6 to be released. Quark is a two bit company that doesn't give a toss for it's customers. The only reason they had a monopoly for so long was because there was no real competition and because prepress is necessarily very conservative (dealines get broken when one fools with new software).

However it does seem as if InDesign is starting to make major inroads in the business and it might very well mean the death of Quark in the long run, because I honestly don't see Quark being flexible enough to be able to compete.

I couldn't care a stuff. Quark died for me in 1998 when they killed mTropolis. However this might very well leave Adobe behaving as badly as Quark if Adobe ever get into a monopoly position with InDesign. Their recent track record has been anything but assuring.

I truly wish that the open source crowd would cooperate more in the design/publishing arena. I'm pretty sure, from looking at the 2.0 version of the GIMP that they could at the least force commercial companies to improve their practices.