Quark! Quark!

I've been pretty pleased with myself over the last month or so. I'd bought a copy of QuarkXPress 7.0, the self-proclaimed king of desk top publishing and print preparation software, and actually produced an issue of a magazine.

I had to learn to use the software on the hoof, and was very grateful to Lynda.com for its structured online training exercises. I'd never have got the hang of it with the manual, nor a book.

The basics are quite easy to learn and implement. It's the more 'advanced' features that are going to take some time to master. And version 7.0 is supposed to be able to help you build websites.

I've been running the software on a PC with XP. I haven't found the software particularly intuitive. Formatting that you could do so easily in Microsoft Word seems to involve going round the houses in Quark.

Perhaps it's easier to implement on a Mac. My Mac Book Pro is in the post and I intend to transfer the licence from the PC to the Mac.

Ten minutes ago, I got an email from Quark advertising a series of free seminars at Apple stores throughout UK, which would highlight the new features introduced in QuarkXPress 7. It was a bit late. The nearest seminar was in Birmingham yesterday. OK, so I could go to Sheffield on Friday, but I've got another engagement that day. No mention of Nottingham. Perhaps the company's gone out of business.

A link invited me to find out more. I clicked. I could hardly believe it. Problem loading page in Firefox, so I looked at the domain name in the status bar. email.quark.com Well, that doesn't seem right, particularly when the published text says euro.quark.com

I put euro.quark.com in the address bar, and hey presto, I get offered the option to choose between English, French and German.

Once at the English Language site, I was apalled at the very poor quality of the text (have they never heard of anti-aliasing?) and the mixed fonts. The navigation is a travesty. Hover over a main heading such as Training, and a sub-menu appears. Move the mouse to click on a sub-heading, and the whole menu disappears.

For a company that professes to market top-notch software, this is amateurism in the extreme.

I suppose we're stuck with Quark because no other software provides quite the right kind of flexibility for the task of desk top publishing. But I would never use it for web design, if they used their own product to build their website.

I've discovered that there is an open-source version of DTP software called Scribus, but I haven't loaded it yet. Could be worth looking at.