Quark comparative table

[PaoloT]

Quark published a comparative table that contains several wrong information about Affinity Publisher. I would frankly ask them to revise them and publish a correct one.

QXP Competitors Comparision

As for the correct ones, they are useful to get inspiration.

Paolo

 

[Medical Officer Bones]

One entry is quite misleading: "Create QuarkXPress Project from PDF (Open PDF)". Remove the word "QuarkXPress" and the answer becomes "yes" for Publisher.

Publisher opens PDFs and convert those to native Publisher projects, but obviously doesn't support native QXP projects...

The wording here is intentionally misleading. And there are things missing that are unique to Publisher in this list as well, so...

Interesting though that QXP is seemingly starting to feel the effect of Affinity Publisher in the marketplace. They must be taking it seriously enough to include Publisher in this comparison table.

On the  other hand, the most glaring missing features in Publisher do stand out.

[Medical Officer Bones]

...I checked out QXP's pricing (which I hadn't for a while).

For one perpetual license of QXP at $699 (maintenance for one year) users can get their hands on BOTH InDesign (for a year sub) and the full Affinity suite of Photo, Designer, and Publisher for ~$165 + ~$264 = $429.

QXP is so overpriced. The only reason why it is still used in the industry here and there is because of automation.

Oh, and don't fall for QXP's perpetual license: it's only perpetual until you upgrade your OS and/or machine.

[MikeW]

26 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

...QXP is so overpriced. The only reason why it is still used in the industry here and there is because of automation.

Oh, and don't fall for QXP's perpetual license: it's only perpetual until you upgrade your OS and/or machine.

Why, yes it is. A serious break from reality. 

Your last paragraph, though, really only applies to Apple's incessant OS upgrades that break many applications, not just QXP. Under Windows, I have versions 9 through 2023 installed and running just fine.

[Medical Officer Bones]

25 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Why, yes it is. A serious break from reality. 

Your last paragraph, though, really only applies to Apple's incessant OS upgrades that break many applications, not just QXP. Under Windows, I have versions 9 through 2023 installed and running just fine.

I haven't touched Quark in two decades. Is it still that clunky to work with? I also remember it being crash-prone on Windows.

They have a trial. I ought to check that out myself and see where they are at.

[Medical Officer Bones]

Right... They're still the same old Quark that I was happy to part ways with.

A 7 day only trial? Personal data processed for "related follow-up activities" --> required ??!

I think not dear Quark people. Little wonder why you got pushed out of the market. Worst customer experience ever.

(Affinity: Hey people! Get six months of Affinity for free to try our products out!)

[Medical Officer Bones]

[edited to remove personal bias]

First impressions: the base GUI hasn't changed much.

• no page preview thumbnails
• no layer preview thumbnails
• Layer panel uses tiny list entries.
•  style sheet editor (text styles) entries still cannot be directly double-clicked to edit.
• The paragraph style editor is still the messy little affair that I remember.
• Previewing of changes in the style editor(s) is still not possible. Change a setting in the style editor. Let's say the paragraph justification. Nothing happens. Click OK. Close the dialog. The changes are applied. That could be improved a lot from a UX point of view.
• Guides still can't be organized using layers (this is also true in Publisher)
• New document (project) dialog is quite basic. No previews of what the document will look like.
• baseline settings, similar to InDesign, rather awkward to work with. Publisher takes the lead here in my opinion.

Second impressions:

• proper non-Western language support
• can export epub, FXL and flowing
• can export to html
• premium version can even export to Android and iOS apps
• more mature and comparable to InDesign. Publisher still cannot create spreads beyond 2 pages, which QXP and InDesign also have no issues with.
• import AND export to IDML. Pleasantly surprised by this. This is super-important to have: IDML has become an open standard. Affinity must add IDML export as well.

These panels could use an update. No change after 2 decades of development, which I would have expected.

 

Overall impressions are that QuarkXPress is still the old QuarkXPress. Like InDesign it has a list of more mature features that I desperately would want Publisher to have, yet at the same time both InDesign and QXP remain backward in some regards compared to Publisher.

I do feel justified in my opinion that QXP's core GUI components (layer panel, style panel and dialogs, layer panel) are just screaming for an update.

[fde101]

6 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

dialogs such as the text style editor still open in a light mode!

I maintain a license for QXP under macOS; I just verified this is not the case for me.  Both paragraph and character text style editors are dark like the rest of the interface.  May be a Windows version issue?

 

6 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

keep opening and closing that dialog for every change you make to preview the changes.

In all fairness, there is the option of updating a selected bit of text which uses the style by using the controls along the bottom of the screen, then hitting the Update button to match the style to the text.

[MikeW]

11 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

I used a dud email address to get my hands on the trial version.

Installed it, and it's a blast from the past. It's pretty much the same QXP GUI from over 2 decades ago! Amazing!

These are merely my first impressions, of course. Still a very nostalgic experience... vitriol removed ...

Gee, is anyone surprised about your "assessment"? No matter what you think, I can still make my money far faster in QXP than APub.

Let me spin a tale. It's about a very capable image editing application that is far greater than just an image editing application. Its interface was like something from the 1990s until less than a decade ago. The brothers who are the programmers had to be carried, kicking and screaming, to update its looks. Some would say it still looks very 1990s with a fresh application of lipstick. Compared to the "looks" of say Affinity Photo, it's still a very dated looking application--but one that can do more and do it better than APhoto.

Who in their right mind would use such an application? Who in their right mind would defend such an application? Who in their right mind would suggest its use even in these forums? 

[Medical Officer Bones]

@MikeW I yield! I yield! 🙂

QuarkXPress brings out the worst out of me... sorry. There is bad blood between me and Quark with a number of horrible customer service experiences back between 2000 and 2005. Both when I worked at a print company as well as a freelancer. Got so bad that I switched to InDesign within a week. And I had a LOT of work done in QXP.

Thinking about these interactions still riles me up, so I do admit being predisposed against Quark. Apologies, and I will edit my earlier post about QuarkXPress.

[MikeW]

No worries! And no need to edit the post. Most all of your points are valid...at least to you and others.

All I care about is efficiently getting work done. What the interface looks like is pretty irrelevant to me.

But hey, you want a real laugh about another application's comparison to APub, look up Viva Designer's comparison. Someone in their marketing department "tried" real hard. ;^)

Even so, I also use Viva Designer too.

[Medical Officer Bones]

@MikeW I wrote that post in an angry mood, and reading it back it feels infantile in places. So I did edit the post and used a more neutral tone.

As for Viva Designer: Another one that I tried in my quest for an InDesign alternative. 🙂

I'll check out that comparison. At least VD has page thumbnails 😃. Interesting to see that Publisher does seem to have an impact on the smaller players in the DTP market (in that they feel that they need to publish biased comparison lists).

My ideal InDesign replacement would be something along the lines of Affinity Publisher with the paper cuts removed, IDML export, Asian language support, arbitrary numbered spreads, reflowable epub export, proper 1bit support, MD import, and structural document features similar to Framemaker.

Hey, not asking for much 🤑

PS I thought that Viva Designer's intro start up dialog is nicely presented and animated.

[MikeW]

And I turn off page thumbnails in anything/everything that allows it...Don't need/want them.

But, choice is a good thing. And because of that, I believe every layout application should off that choice.

btw, there is a page thumbnail view in QXP. Not the same as having it in the page palette, though. But a quick Shift+F6 gets one this:

However, navigating to a chosen page is still a two-step process. Kinda clunky if one intends to use it for navigation purposes.

There is also the bottom page row available...but also without thumbnails, but I do use it to quickly jump to a new page at times.

I guess my views as regards how applications look comes from my years owning/operating a design firm / service bureau wherein we maintained licenses for just about everything and used them all to meet client demands and compatibility. I have always had my own application preferences and when it didn't matter, those were our weapons of choice.

While I haven't seen a comparison from Serif themselves to alternatives, one could bet it too would be biased. I mean, reading their marketing stuff about publisher has  several misleading statements.

[Petar Petrenko]

On 8/17/2024 at 12:03 PM, PaoloT said:

Quark published a comparative table that contains several wrong information about Affinity Publisher.

Yes, I saw this table on their Facebook page, but they lock it for comments. They also forgot to mention some features that Publisher has and both, QXP and ID, doesn't.

[Petar Petrenko]

On 8/18/2024 at 4:46 AM, Medical Officer Bones said:

import AND export to IDML. Pleasantly surprised by this. This is super-important to have: IDML has become an open standard. Affinity must add IDML export as well.

When Publisher gets that feature, I'll abandon InDesign for good.

[PaoloT]

On 8/18/2024 at 4:46 AM, Medical Officer Bones said:

import AND export to IDML. Pleasantly surprised by this. This is super-important to have: IDML has become an open standard. Affinity must add IDML export as well.

Working on a translation right now. The source and target files are IDML. Any existing alternative would have meant having to manually rebuild entire chapters.

Paolo