QuarkXPress For Dummies

Introduction

At the height of its worldwide popularity, QuarkXPress had almost 4 million users. That proved too tempting a plum for the competing Adobe juggernaut not to pluck from the desktop publishing pie, so over the course of 10 years, Adobe was able to draw many graphic designers to InDesign by providing it for free in bundles with Photoshop and Illustrator. Meanwhile, Quark underwent a complete metamorphosis, changing ownership and management to become the company that created this jewel of digital publishing: QuarkXPress 2016.

Meanwhile, the publishing industry itself experienced major changes, embracing multiple ever-changing digital formats — and QuarkXPress evolved along with these changes. QuarkXPress 2016 is not your father’s, mother’s, or grandparents’ QuarkXPress: Although the program has maintained its trademark efficiency and focus on the day-to-day needs of real-world publishers, it has also become a multifunction, platform-agnostic publishing engine capable of efficiently producing documents for any medium today — or that may present itself in the future.

Many graphic designers lost track of QuarkXPress, and they wonder what kind of organizations have continued to use it year after year. The simple answer is this: companies that value time and efficiency over bells and whistles. Financial organizations, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing industries, newspapers and magazines, book publishers, multilingual publishers, and especially East Asian publishers ...