Beyond "Desktop" Thinking...

So you've "moved on" from QuarkXPress^® and you're not looking back, eh? Adobe^® InDesign^® has certainly made serious inroads into publishing and we at GLUON support InDesign by making award-winning plug-ins such as Slugger, ProScale, Cropster and Colorbreaker for InDesign. InDesign is a great desktop product...but make sure not to confuse "desktop" thinking with "enterprise" thinking!

We consider the battle between InDesign and QuarkXPress to be similar to the battle between Ford and GM or other car makers. InDesign vs. QuarkXPress is sort of like Taurus vs. Malibu. Both get you to from A to B. One has better handling, the other has better acceleration and mileage. However, this is the industrial, virtual world of the Internet and Enterprise Publishing where Quark has been investing it's efforts since the mid-nineties. Now we're talking Lincoln vs. Lexus (or maybe it's Mack vs. Peterbuilt). Quark's done much more than make a headless, server version of QuarkXPress desktop—it's almost a completely different animal. Server software needs to receive many simultaneous requests and manage them efficiently and quickly and get results back to a bunch of browsers at the same time for starters.

QuarkXPress Server is essentially a web-centric, super-advanced PDF rendering engine (as well as a bevy of other formats). The end-user in a browser doesn't care whether the invisible back end is based on Quark or Adobe technology. They want speed and quality and to see results on-demand. What you want is reliability and print quality. QuarkXPress Servers are deployed in some of the most demanding environments rendering huge documents, filled with all sorts of text formatting, transparencies, drop shadows, hi-res graphics, etc. Not only does it handle all this, but is eats it for breakfast, lunch and dinner! While Adobe has been busy honing it's sights on what was once dubbed as a "Quark Killer", Quark has been quietly concentrating on cutting-edge server technology, working with Apple, HP, Pantone, Microsoft and many other standards-making organizations to make an engine second-to-none capable of rendering millions of complex pages without a single failure!

This is not to say thay HyperPublishing couldn't be adapted to InDesign Server. It could and we would do it if we felt it was worth the monumental effort it would take to replicate the millions of lines of code in HyperRender and HyperTemplate, etc. just to get back to point B, where we already are. Also, we've found making InDesign technology is more expensive to maintain and takes longer to develop because of significant architechtural differences and other reasons...costs that get passed to the customer. So it does come down to necessity, resources and money—as do most things.

Also, if you haven't seriously looked at QuarkXPress 7, then you are missing out on some incredible innovations that make other apps look a little less innovative than they once looked. Things like Color-based Transparency, Job Jackets, Composition Zones and multiple Layout Spaces are the tip of a larger philosophy iceberg which will become more apparent in version 8, due in 2008. We're impressed and so are our customers who are reaping performance benefits of our joint industrial strength software solutions.

Finally, there is no impediment to using InDesign documents with the server. The process of converting .indd to .qxp is simple and fast and becoming faster all the time. After all, other solutions such as Printables and PageFlex are neither Quark nor Adobe based. Many solutions take you down an unfamiliar road of "reinvented wheels" and proprietary templates and uncertain publishing capabilities. At least in the case of QuarkXPress Server, you can create a template using a standard layout application and if you have our HyperTemplate XT the process of adding new templates to your dynamic web store takes minutes, not hours or days. And you know that every detail down to the kerning pairs and color profiles has been worked out from decades of real-world print production.

Please contact a GLUON representative for more reasons not to dismiss QuarkXPress Server for "desktop" reasons. Call 973-763-9494.