Quark Publishing System Now Supports InDesign Files
You didn’t expect to see the word Quark in a blog post here, did you?! Our friend and colleague Branislav Milic pointed us to Quark’s press release today that they are now supporting Adobe InDesign and InCopy in their workflow management system. Here is even more information about it.
Given that that Quark’s flagship product, QuarkXPress, has fallen dramatically in market share, it only makes sense that they would want to expand the market for their workgroup QPS product.
I haven’t used or even seen this product, so I can’t vouch for it, but it seems like it might be an interesting move and helpful to some of our readers. Current competitive workgroup systems include Vjoon K4, Woodwing SmartConnection, and a host of custom solutions from integrators all over the globe.
Do you have experience with QPS, K4, or other workflow solutions? I’d love to hear about them, below.
This is a very interesting move on Quark’s part, and one that I will be watching closely to see how things develop.
In these dynamic publishing systems, the page layout app is just one piece of a big puzzle, and the other pieces don’t really care whether they’re moving QXP, INDD, or PB&J. In my experience, ID’s great features are sometimes rendered sadly irrelevant. So long as the content is in XML and at the end it spits out PDF and Flash, it’s all good. If Quark can make a better workflow module than vjoon or Woowing, and the pieces fit, hey, why not use it? You might make an analogy to Apple switching to Intel chips.
From what I’ve seen of it, the front-end authoring piece, XPress Author, is pretty nifty too. Though, it’d be a lot niftier if there was a Mac version. Personally, I’m still dreaming of a full-powered browser-based InCopy solution or, even better, RIA.
Quark XPress server also has a transformation engine server module to construct/deconstruct/transform docs via XML.
Quark is definitely talking the talk now.
Say it with me, “modular enterprise scalable architecture.”
Then again, some things never change. I downloaded the Quark 8 demo a while back to take a look-see, and didn’t get around to installing it. Later when I tried, I was informed that my 30 day trial period had ended, even though I’d never clicked on the thing. I thought, “OK, that’s all I need to know.”
I was in Chicago today (Monday) and stopped by the Quark booth. They mentioned this, but I didn’t actually see a demo. I agree with Mike , it was an interesting announcement. Guess we’ll see how this develops.