As the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.

Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and... uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do—or fail to do—that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn’t listen.

The rise

I went to a high school for the arts—yes, it was just like Fame, so stop asking—and only got seriously into computers, Photoshop, and design in the early nineties. Back then, when asked “what program do you learn for jobs in page layout and design," there was only one answer: QuarkXPress. Sure, you might have heard the name Pagemaker by Aldus—later purchased by Adobe—but even with my little awareness of the publishing world outside our school walls, it was obvious that no one used it. When I eventually got summer jobs in DTP service bureaus and magazines, the dominance of QuarkXPress 3 was total. The widely reported statistics were that XPress enjoyed 95 percent dominance of the publishing market at that time. But when I left Vice in ’99, the privately held Quark Inc.’s best days were behind them. That was the year that Adobe’s InDesign 1.0 hit the market.

To say that InDesign made a splash would be optimistic. Most of us were too busy using XPress in hardened, well-established production routines under tight deadlines. We didn't immediately notice something that had as good a chance at taking over our honed workflow as did a reversion to Letraset. But things swiftly changed, and by 2004, Quark’s market share reportedly declined to 25 percent. That is what we in the publishing biz refer to as “totally insane.”

Hubris

Anecdotal evidence is not the best way to objectively study anything, but ask anyone what caused them to leave XPress for InDesign. Overwhelmingly, it all boils down to those personal stories of neglect that eventually eroded Quark's appeal and made a potentially painful transfer to another product the lesser of the evils.

In 2001, Apple released OS X, which felt dog slow on existing hardware. Despite its inclusion of crucial publishing tech like AppleScript and ColorSync, it was definitely not production-ready. But OS 9’s failings are well documented—a bad font in an ad could literally cost you a third of your day dealing with system crashes. OS X’s single promise of Unix-like stability turned its other short-term problems with snappiness into non-issues.

Quark repeatedly failed to make OS X-native versions of XPress—spanning versions 4.1, 5, and 6—but the company still asked for plenty of loot for the upgrades. With user frustration high with 2002’s Quark 5, CEO Fred Ebrahimi salted the wounds by taunting users to switch to Windows if they didn’t like it, saying, “The Macintosh platform is shrinking." Ebrahimi suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should "switch to something else."

It's advice people apparently took—just not the way he meant it. It was likely that Quark saw increasing growth in Windows sales as a sign that the Mac publishing market was dwindling. However, what they were probably seeing was new users, not migration to Windows. I've heard about Windows-based publishing environments, but I've never actually seen one in my 20+ years in design and publishing.

Perhaps this seems like an overstatement, but desktop publishing was invented on the Mac. It would have been hard to find people more rabidly pro-Mac than people who were basically keeping pre-Jobs Apple afloat. So when a revitalized Apple needed all the help it could get, telling Mac designers to switch to Windows was all the excuse these creatives needed to think that the grass was actually greener on the InDesign side. Simply put, this was a crucial nudge for many.

Then came InDesign

With 95 percent market share for its competition, InDesign faced an obvious uphill battle. But this market war turned out to be shorter than anyone would have predicted. It didn’t hurt that InDesign was backed by the much larger Adobe, but it was the energy and excitement surrounding InDesign's features that created a buzz you never saw with Quark. Adobe wasn't just copying Quark's approach or feature set—it made a program that was both for production nuts who needed to work efficiently and creatives who were shown how digital typography and layout was meant to be. As I wrote in my review, A QuarkXPress User’s Review of InDesign CS, the creative features of InDesign CS1 were impressive and made you realize that text could be honored, not just corralled into dull templates. Some of its innovations seem like common sense because they were. There are too many to write about here, but consider this list of the kind of stuff that InDesign CS1 had that QuarkXPress 6 didn't have:

Hanging type

When you lay out a print publication, there is a lot of margin finagling that happens in order to keep things looking clean and readable. You'll often set a "T" farther to the left of the margin to be a little more aligned to the letter's vertical stem with the margin edge. This creates a more pleasant overall shape to your text blocks:

If it's a drop cap in a paragraph, that means that the "T" technically hangs outside of the text box to the left. This was never supported in QuarkXPress, so you were left to make a separate text box for the "T," remove the drop caps settings from the main text block, and then tediously move the large "T" over the other text block to create a wraparound effect. After minutes of work, this accomplished one thing: a single letter hanging to the left of a paragraph. When you realize that this had to be done for every quotation mark in pull quotes or at the start of unindented paragraphs, that's a lot of wasted time. InDesign supported hanging type for this reason:

Notice how the dot in the "i" in "Hanging" also sits outside of the block. If you forced that line down to sit inside the rectangle, it would create a slight but unappealing vertical misalignment when you went to align the top border to other elements like pictures. You're probably thinking, "so just move the text box up," but print publications are designed with grids, and eyeballing wastes time. InDesign's text boxes were meant to be created within that grid system, and these create ideal type within a grid—no manual realignment or eyeballing required.

OpenType support

Contextual ligatures, fractions, etc. This was huge.

Trimmed page preview to see how your page looks when printed

This may seem like a small thing, but seeing your document as a trimmed booklet made a big difference for designers. Quark’s white pasteboard with a borderline through it could be visually misleading in the same way that painting your office red might be.

You could change multiple items (stroke color/value, for example) at once

It's truly laughable that this wasn't in QuarkXPress already. You had to edit one. thing. at. a. time.

Per-object stroke settings

In Quark, they were document-wide.

Eyedropper tool

To sample and apply styling to objects or text. This was absolutely massive for productivity since you didn't have to create a stylesheet just to match two blocks of text.

Pencil/pen tools

Better tools for more organic shapes.

High-res previews that were accurate

Where QuarkXPress layouts looked terrible without plug-ins to aid visualization, InDesign even made linked EPS files look good. It also rendered colors, accurately reflecting inks onscreen:

Effective resolution shown for scaled images

This reduced the need for preflight tools, which were an added expense.

A glyph palette

It was common knowledge among QuarkXPress users that you had to buy Popchar to get a feature that should have been in the app itself: a basic glyph palette to view custom characters and diacritics.

Excel file support

Duh.

Transparency and apply modes for PostScript Level 3 devices

This was another game-changer that saved trips to Photoshop or Illustrator to achieve simple transparency or apply-mode effects. It opened the doors up to a lot of creativity.

Optical kerning

Most of the time, you want to use a font's embedded kerning tables. But sometimes, they don't always produce the best results. I use a find/replace and optical kerning to fix all occurrences of French words like l’état, which always have the apostrophe squished in between the surrounding letters. Optical kerning saved manual kerning table edits to fix things like this. It was also great when combined with…

Listing image by Aurich Lawson