Opinion: Support for OpenType is welcome (and overdue), but will it be enough to compete with Adobe's InDesign?The past two or three years have been challenging for Quark. From its overhyped arrival in 2000, Adobe's InDesign has grown to become the technology leader in publishing.
And while the initial response to the program was tepid, the market has become increasingly excited about the second and third release of Adobe's page layout application.
Around the world, major publishers and ad agencies have switched to InDesign, which offers a number of features QuarkXPress lacks in its last release.
The technology preview Quark staged in London today during a typography event sponsored by LinoType was clearly designed to show the market that Quark is hard at work trying to catch up with its increasingly popular rival.
It is true that InDesign has always offered a more mature composition engine and type support; Quark, on the other hand, had not significantly changed its type-related functionality in over 10 years, and the lack of OpenType support had been considered a serious drawback by professional publishers who compared the two programs.
With QuarkXPress 7 (no delivery date has been announced) this problem will be a thing of the past. But will it be enough to stop the erosion in the market? Publishers will certainly regret that Quark apparently will not offer support for multi-line composition and hanging punctuation.
On the other hand, Quark is increasingly showing that it is hard at work reinventing itself: The company now offers free tech support and has made the quite substantial 6.5 upgrade available free to existing users (which was not something Quark was renowned for in the past).
QuarkXPress also has a very loyal user base—users who will see the latest announcements as yet another reason to stick to the program they have in many cases used for years.
It remains to be seen whether the next release can stop the erosion of market share to Adobe's program; in the meantime the competition keeps the market moving.
Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.
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