Nov 12 2004
The Great Quark to InDesign Migration Contest Winner Announced!
Thanks to all of you who entered our Great Quark to InDesign Migration Contest. And now we are pleased to announce that a winner has been chosen. Prizes are already en route to this lucky unsuspecting individual and the chosen “Dear Quark” letter will be sent out to Quark headquarters Monday morning.
Oh, I suppose you’d like to know the name and read the winning entry, huh? … drum-roll …
Our winner is none other than Jeff Ferzoco of New York, NY.
Congratulations, Jeff!!!
And now for his winning composition….
Dear Quark,Oh, I wish this were a harder letter to write. I’ll begin by affirming that I’ve moved forward to a new program, InDesign. I feel, however, that I owe you an explanation and must lay out a few reasons why it had to be this way. I’ll try to make it easy for you to understand, but am not certain you will, given your response time in the past.
My needs weren’t being met. To put it simply, we grew apart long ago and never recovered. I had moved on to OS X, while you were still on 7, 8 and 9. It became very difficult for me to work quickly and I think I honestly started resenting you, doing entire layouts in Illustrator just to avoid opening your application. Once you responded and caught up, it seemed as though you hadn’t changed at all — no shiny Aqua interface, minimal palette reorganization, sub-standard EPS previews and immature new features (Layers? Where?). Your impaired and obese PDFs were simply the beginning of the end. Yes, I could have made a PS file, then run it through Distiller, then shrunk it manually in Acrobat, but I’d just done that one time too many.
For future reference, when someone asks for better type controls, give it to them. None of this three-step-to-hanging-punctuation business. Let the type go outside the box for heaven’s sake! Give me ALL the glyphs accessible in a palette! If only you had thought about our relationship more…
Oh, and I tried to tell you, believe me. Our communication was shut down when you closed your user-to-user forums. YOU TOOK AWAY MY ONLY HELPFUL RESOURCE! WHYYYYY? I had already been courted by another program, and at that point it became clear I should explore my preferences. Really, if I heard you say “File not found” or witnessed a corrupt document one more time, I was going to end up in Bellevue or Sing-Sing.
InDesign encourages me to edit vector files directly in the layout, drop nearly any file from the desktop to the page, and use transparency. Let’s just say that I’m happier where I’ve gone. Things are smoother and quicker for me now. It feels easy and integrated for the first time. Don’t take this personally, but I don’t think you could have (or wanted to) changed enough to keep me around.
Certainly, Quark, I won’t undo this decision. Mostly because you may or may not let me, depending on your arbitrary decision about my last action. Given that, I will be moving on and taking our mutual friends with me. They were all on the outs with you anyway.
Best of luck surviving in the market.
Jeff Ferzoco
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