Apple Reviews

Old technology being rapidly overtaking by InDesign 2.0, especially if you want to use OS X. If you are just starting in page layout, use InDesign. If you have been doing it for awhile and have a lot of documents in xpress format, byte the bullet now and convert them to InDesign. You are going to have to at some point anyway.

Although QuarkXpress 5.0 delivers everything its previous version offers, frankly, it doesn't offer enough in addition to these things to merit a $900 upgrade. In fact, this new version has some very serious drawbacks--namely, it is not native to OS X, meaning it has to run in the sometimes choppy "Classic" system. This leads to major refresh problems that can be quite a hassle. In addition, some of the things that have always bothered me about Quark--the necessity of clipping paths, making images transparent, etc.--are still there. I'm actually in the process of switching over to Adobe InDesign, which fixes all these problems AND is native to OSX. Until Quark comes out with a patch or an upgrade that will make their program native to OSX, pass on buying this upgrade, which offers little for the extremely high price.

I have both InDesign and Quark and I have to say that Quark is the most reliable and efficient of the two. InDesign is a PageMaker that aspires to be Quark. Especially great is the new Quark feature that collects the fonts as well as images. Before you could only collect the images! No more searching around for all those fonts. Quark crashes far less than all the other programs I use combined.