I remember the Mac vs. PC debate from years ago that seems totally irrelevant now and has for what seems like forever. Yes, I am a mac geek.

Today there's a debate over InDesign vs. Quark. Quark 7 is on the way and promises to level the playing field having rewritten it's code from top to bottom and side to side. It sports a new enhanced graphics engine under the hood and Quark even claims to handle transparency better, and independently within the same box, even more intuitively.

Quark doesn't mention Adobe by name or refer to them as the other guys. They don't give credit to Adobe for pushing Quark into revamping their juggernaut software title. Time will tell if they can catch Adobe. There is after all a noticeable shift this year from QuarkXpress to Adobe InDesign.

Does anyone remember the days when Quark rose to world domination over Aldus Pagemaker? (insert favorite term of abuse here in place of pagemaker. Mine is Painmaker ) Aldus was acquired in 1994 by Adobe. Payback sure is a bitch.

Does it really matter?

Here is a bold statement. Quark 4, believe it or not, is still considered by some to be the best version of Quark. But it is dated. Quark 6.5 appears stable enough in OSX to knock off it's older brother from the number one spot. What's still disappointing though is the RGB color sliders are still defining colors with 0-100% values instead of 0-255 values. This sucks when you need to match RGB colors by the numbers. Yes of course there are workarounds, there always are but it's damn difficult to match RGB colors from other programs because of this defect.

Who cares?

How nice of you to ask...At Print05 Quark seemed surprised at the request to change this but at least they listened, or pretended to. I won't hold my breath waiting to see if it gets anywhere. As far as I know, I asked, there are no official plans to change the way RGB color sliders work in Quark.

What are we looking at today?

InDesign has matured a lot from it's version 1.0 days. Adobe's apparent seamless integration of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, along with Acrobat is a definite favorite. The alpha mask as a silo outside Photoshop is pretty cool too. These are not exclusive to Adobe only products but the seamless integration ties it together nicely. Transparency however...well...ouch! Please compose it in Photoshop to get it right the first time.

So what's your pain with Quark and InDesign and what's your fix? Do you juggle them or are you an either / or user?