QuarkXPress, for so long the dominant force in the page layout arena, now finds itself fighting for survival and under attach by four products all created by Adobe, who look like achieving the same kind of dominance in the creative market that Microsoft have achieved in the general computing market.

The huge advantage that Adobe has in this battle of the DTP giants is that most users and potential users of QuarkXPress will also be users of one or more members of the Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. Every time the question of upgrades comes around, there will always be the option, for such users, of upgrading one of their Adobe products to the Adobe Creative Suite rather than just upgrading to the latest version of QuarkXPress.

Many will say that Quark only have themselves to blame for the uphill struggle they now face. It's almost as if they believed that their position in the marketplace was somehow unassailable. QuarkXPress was for many years way overpriced and lacking in features but it was the only piece of page layout software which could be relied upon to deliver consistent results in the prepress environment.

The fierce rivalry between InDesign and QuarkXPress will probably be good news for users of page layout software. We can expect the rapid addition of cool new features in each new release of the two programs and, hopefully, equally speedy releases of bug fixes.

In response to Adobe's claims of tight integration between InDesign and other Creative Suite programs, Quark seem to be taking the "If you can't beat them, join them" attitude. QuarkXPress now allows the importing of files saved in Photoshop's native .PSD file extension and has a nifty PSD Import palette which allows sophisticated manipulation of elements within the file. Because these changes are shown in the context of the final layout, there may even be an argument for making these changes in QuarkXPress rather than Photoshop.

So, does QuarkXPress have much of a future? Most designers have now chosen InDesign as their preferred page layout software. However, it is not just designers and publishing professionals who will determine Quark's future. There are many users in the corporate and education sectors and, as with the web arena, there are an increasing number of non-specialist users of QuarkXPress who may be targeted in the future with the release of an intro-level version of the software.

About the Author, Andrew Whiteman:

The author of this article has been teaching training courses on QuarkXPress for many years. He is a trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent IT training company based in London. Link directory.