For Muster Mark · 8 April 2003
My pal John Gruber has posted a clarifying from Quark Inc., publishers of the page layout application Quark Xpress. It’s funny.
When I began doing book design in the early Nineties there were a number of programs conducive to book-length projects, but really only two worked well to bridge the gap between designers working on Macintoshes and the filmsetting houses that output their work: Aldus Pagemaker and Quark Xpress. This isn’t to say that these weren’t lousy programs; both steered the designer toward features that seemed to exist for no reason other than that they could: the Postscript page rendering language made possible all kinds of layering, filtering, stroking, distorting, shading, filling and deliberate buggering up of text and image, all of which were placed right in the line of sight of the person clicking around until things sort of looked right. And use them they did, use them they sure did.
Neither application even pretended to give two hoots about the time-honed standards of good typography, and both remained persistently shackled to one of the most foresight-free computer standards ever devised, the Type 1 Postscript font. Almost twenty years old, this format still rules print production, and this sucks, of which more in a moment.
Pagemaker, a crash-prone beast with a counterintuitive interface and slow as molasses in winter, was eventually bought by Adobe, whereupon everyone stopped using it and its unofficial name (‘Pagefucker’) took on common usage. This sent Quark flinging toward its destiny: to become a hostile monopoly spinning around in circles of pointless development, embracing dead-end technologies only to abandon customers once profitability proved unlikely, hobbling their own products with draconian antipiracy measures, signing unbendable licensing agreements in blood with newspaper chains, joining up with enemy Adobe to squish Quickdraw GX (one of many promising standards that actually showed a glimpse, at great development cost, of how sophisticated graphic design on computers could be before withering and dying once Quark said no thanks), and of course pissing off customers who paid a fortune for the privilege. And still it made horribly, horribly typeset pages.
I wonder if somewhere there’s a support group for people to get together and work through feelings that linger on from dealing with Quark tech support in the years 1994–1997. Maybe one for EfiColor, too.
But the killer for me was Opentype. After years of stupid adherence to the stupid Postscript Type 1 stupid font format – in which a type designer’s work is made marginally more useful than it would be if it where chiselled onto the arms of a manual typewriter, so long as the person using the typewriter worked only in North American english (elsewise, you understand, other typewriters would need to be purchased) and is subject to the letterspacing whims and lively mangling gewgaws central to programs like Quark Xpress – a new standard emerged some time ago, called Opentype; it features almost unlimited character sets and adheres to a universal character-encoding standard, it allows for sophisticated spacing and metrics, and extensive type families are available as single binary files that work the same on Windows and Macintosh computers.
Quark’s still not supporting it. Nothing in the press release that John translated indicates they plan to.
Well, hey, after all, no big deal, it’s just text.
Adobe eventually came up with a project, codenamed K2, code-codenamed ‘Quark Killer’, now called Indesign. It’s good. It has native support for Opentype. Nobody uses it.
UPDATE Awright lay off already. I know some people use Indesign – I’m one of them. But with Quark bicycling along at over 90% market share, and with predictable resistance to change in production departments everywhere, you’ll be reading crap text settings for a long time to come.
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