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A brief history of DTP

Posted on 25 Sep 2006 at 12:43

Tom Arah looks at the surprising history of professional desktop publishing and the current state of play

K2 was the codename for an entirely new DTP application begun by Aldus once the company realised that PageMaker had no long-term future, and that new code was required if QuarkXPress was to meet its match. As such, expectations were extraordinarily high when two years later in August 1999 Adobe's "Quark-killer" InDesign finally shipped... and so the disappointment was equally keen. Certainly, InDesign 1 offered some impressive new features, such as built-in PDF export, multiline composing and optical kerning, and advanced frame-based flow control complete with the ability to nest frames within one another. However, other desired features such as table editing, footnote handling, multichapter books, text-on-a-path and many more were all missing. Most disappointing of all, for a supposedly next-generation DTP application, InDesign looked and felt distinctly old-fashioned and strongly reminiscent of PageMaker.

After the "Quark-killer" hype subsided, very few users were tempted to jump ship by InDesign's first release, nor by the 1.5 follow-up in early 2001. It looked as if it might go the way of PageMaker and Ventura, but, in January 2002, InDesign 2 was launched and it was a revelation - alongside true cell-based table editing, book handling and XML import and export, InDesign broke entirely new ground by adding support for transparency. Crucially, this transparency didn't rely on rasterizing down to bitmaps but was PostScript based, so that wherever possible objects were kept as vectors to ensure pin-sharp image-set output.

Support for vector-based transparency and soft-edged alpha channels in imported Photoshop PSD images enabled InDesign users to produce more attractive work, which is what a designer's job is all about. Quark had to respond and it did so within days by releasing QuarkXPress 5 - which was truly dreadful. All it offered in terms of new print power was a belated, and underpowered, ability to handle layers and grid-based tables, the rest of the release focusing on sub-shareware-quality web design tools - an extraordinary misjudgment. 2003's version 6 was little better, compounding the problems by introducing a new file format capable of holding multiple print and web layouts, all unnecessary complication and wasted effort (has anyone ever seen a web publication produced directly from QuarkXPress?)

The trickle of Quark users jumping ship became a flood and InDesign began outselling QuarkXPress. It seemed as though the second DTP war had been decisively won, with Quark effectively ceding the commercial print high ground, especially once Adobe began to exploit its design expertise by bundling InDesign with Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat into the Creative Suite. It began to look inevitable that QuarkXPress would go the way of Ventura and PageMaker, but surprisingly that hasn't happened.

Quark's continued survival was originally due to the sheer inertia of large publishing institutions reluctant to change their established workflows, but this only provided a period of grace. To have a long-term future, Quark needed to change radically, and that's exactly what it's done. The first sign came with 2004's XPress 6.5, which, with its built-in picture retouching effects, finally added a new print-oriented design feature that all users would benefit from (and, better still, which InDesign lacked). Moreover, the upgrade was free for Quark's long-suffering users. More significant still was the recent launch of version 7, which was everything that most users had once hoped for: in particular, it finally saw QuarkXPress catch up with InDesign in terms of core transparency support, so that the rivals are competing again on a level playing field in terms of end result. New features such as the ability for multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously, and a more streamlined interface that shows up InDesign's palette-based bloat, even allow QuarkXPress 7 to claim that it's now a more productive working environment, especially for the core market of regular publishing workgroups.