Bomb Switzerland

Okay, full disclosure: I'm an Adobe guy. Before that I was an Aldus guy.

In case the label isn't obvious enough, this is a new category for me, where I'm just ranting about shit related to my work and if you're not working, at least tangentially, in the graphic arts, it will make no sense whatever. Even if you are, no guarantees.

I remember when Adobe showed InDesign at GraphExpo, announcing they would no longer develop PageMaker. As someone who'd made his living his whole adult life in PageMaker, this was like hearing they'd uninvented the wheel. But the program had a lot of neat features, all of which the demo guy assured us would RIP.

For any of you who didn't think I really meant talking shop: he said this dog would hunt.

But it wouldn't, more often than not, and rather than convert our whole department, we were glad we'd only popped for one review copy.

But InDesign 2 addressed a lot of those issues. And Adobe really did quit PageMaker. If there's a difference between PageMaker 6.5 and 7.0, I forget what it is.

Back in the day, PageMaker and Quark were rivals. Kind of like Van Halen and Van Hagar, there was no disciple of one who could tolerate the other. Both liked to point out all the simple tasks their preferred application did effortlessly that were like brain surgery with a dull knife on the other.

Every version of PageMaker was supposed to be a Quark Killer. Every version failed to live up to that. The typical graphic artist had Quark, PhotoShop and Illustrator on his Mac, and generally thought Adobe should be content with two out of three.

But after InDesign 2, Adobe started to play hardball. They packaged InDesign with PhotoShop and Illustrator and called it a Creative Suite. The three programs could be purchased individually, or you get get all three for less than two alone. Meaning if you wanted to stay Quark/Illustrator/PhotoShop, you could, but only if you wanted to pay extra to not have InDesign shipped as well.

This was well before Adobe bought Macromedia, the only software developer writing anything remotely competitive with Illustrator, and the only WYSWIG web editor that totally kicked GoLive's ass. Macromedia had also picked up Cold Fusion along the way, meaning they had the biggest stake in the serious web development market, probably enough to get Adobe's rocks off by itself.

So whither QuarkXpress? It's not dead yet, but I kind of wish it were.

My new job, I have both at my disposal but almost all the legacy files are Quark, meaning I have to learn to speak the graphic arts equivalent of Esperanto.

Here's the killer, though: my boss was always a Quark guy. He loved Quark. He wanted to have babies with it. And as time has gone by, it's failed to develop capabilities to compete with InDesign.

And when the 7.0 upgrade came out, he snatched it up to find out that, among other things, he couldn't print to half the devices in the shop. Not without saving a PDF of his Quark file to either print from Acrobat Reader or to place in InDesign.

Quark sucks so hard, he's been training himself on InDesign ever since.

But there's all these legacy Quark files and the ones he's opened and worked on in 7, well, I couldn't open them. So he popped for the dubious upgrade for the other machines in our shop.

When the package came, he dropped it on my desk and said, 'Here's your software.'

Normally, this is my cue to drop whatever I'm doing and install whatever it is. The new toy, uh, tool.

But in this case, I put the box off to the side. I just knew that necessary as it might be, that box contained nothing that would make my life easier.

Eventually, of course, I had to put it on the G5 so I could open one of these notorious Quark 7 files.

First impressions: could they make it more of a pain in the ass to register? The excuse to not use dongles is that they break easily, but what about my whole workstation when I'm inspired to go postal and shoot it with an AR-15? You have to have a serial number to get a validation code to get a something or other to even register your copy.

Also, they have a lot of damn gall to sell anything that won't turn text to outlines when InDesign was doing that effortlessly six fucking years ago.

The re-link feature in InDesign where you can tell it to link to a different file than the one you placed, still can't do that in Quark.

If there is something Quark 7 can do that 6.5 can't besides open Quark 7 files, I haven't seen it. These Swiss bastards need to be held accountable. How dare they release this program and pretend it's for professionals. Who do they think they are? Microsoft?