To Quark or Not To Quark?
by Andrew Bowser
To meet a production goal of outputting every page from computer to negative, the Austin (Tex.) American-Statesman is saying goodbye to QuarkXPress.
"I don't think we could have made Quark produce the entire newspaper without involving a host of vendors and an army of technicians to plug the parts together," says Paul Mowry, head of pre-press pagination.
Increasingly, papers that bought Quark expecting to paginate have "hit the wall," claims Don Oldham, chief executive officer of Digital Technologies Inc. DT supplied the American Statesman's turnkey, computer-assisted pagination system.
The American-Statesman's switch is part of a corporate-wide rollout by Cox Newspapers--which has learned from some painful and costly lessons installing and working with DT's suite of pagination applications over the past few years. "Many of those battle-scarred veterans marvel at the way the software works today," Mowry says.
The newspaper plans to put all data in relational databases so they can be shared with advertising clients, readers and other newspapers in the Cox Newspaper corporate family "using today's technology and tomorrow's," Mowry says.
Frustration with the database aspect of Quark has sparked debate. David Jones, group IT director for the Mirror Group Newspapers, which uses the Quark Publishing Systems file tracking and management package, said at an IFRA conference last year that the database issue is receiving "scant attention."
"The industry has created a dominant pagination solution that is defiantly uninterested in our need for database connectivity," Jones was quoted as saying in Newspaper Techniques, IFRA's monthly journal. "How wise are we to embrace a pagination solution...whose proprietary format precludes a database elsewhere in the network?"
The day may not be far away when Quark users have access to integral database connectivity. The company has an agreement in place with Oracle to explore how database support could be provided, says Don Lohse, 'XPress product manager.
"It's not like databases are foreign to us," Lohse says.
Many newspapers adopting pagination systems still use Quark as an underlying production tool. For instance, users of CCI applications typically design page components with Quark, along with Illustrator, FreeHand and Photoshop, and transfer them to CCI applications as EPS files.
However, the CCI applications use a standard database and standard data format. "Even with Quark's XTension tools, CCI could not, using Quark, realize the strong integration between the design tool and the database as we can with our LayoutChamp," says Jorgen Valker, vice president for North American project sales for CCI Europe.
Another paper downplaying Quark is the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, which installed a 93-seat DT editorial system. The Telegraph achieved partial pagination using QuarkXPress, but DT software has automated the tracking and page assembly process, according to Mike Cox, information-services director.
The Portland (Maine) Press Herald will also use a DT system to output classifieds (by February), retail ads (by March), and editorial (by May 1). The goal is to output negatives directly from computer. Previously, Quark was used on the editorial side. "We never considered [Quark] as our final solution," says Ray Ragone, systems editor.
But it's hard to imagine newspapers without a Quark presence. Even the Portland and Austin papers plan to continue using Quark for various tasks. And other newspapers have recently adopted QPS, including the Evansville (Ind.) Courier, which struggled with two proprietary systems before settling on the Quark package.
Bowser is a frequent TechNews contributor. E-mail, andyb@comm.net; phone, (504) 897-4026.