Quark Inc. was founded more than 30 years ago, and their flagship product QuarkXPress was released more than 25 years ago. In recent years, many graphic designers have switched to Adobe’s InDesign for their page layout needs, but both Quark and QuarkXPress have continued to develop and thrive — especially in the publishing markets (both small and enterprise level).
In the six years since Quark replaced its leadership with experts from the world of digital and automated publishing, the business of publishing has dramatically changed. The earlier model used by newspapers and magazines was to lay out a printed publication and then repurpose its content on the Web. Today, content needs to be generated for multiple media and devices simultaneously, so that readers may consume the same information in print, on websites, smart phones, and tablets. In addition, designers and publishers are now including rich, interactive experiences in their digital publications and need simple, affordable — sometimes automated — tools to produce them.
Quark’s strongest customer base has always been publishers who need to be efficient. Even back when QuarkXPress was used for 90% of all professional publishing and design, Quark aimed its feature set at publishers. Part of the reason for this focus on publishing was the passion that Quark’s founders had for empowering people around the world to be able to create and print their own publications without requiring huge investments of money into equipment.
Back in the 1980s, publishing a newspaper or other periodical required an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars (and that’s 1980s dollars). The arrival of Apple’s Macintosh and LaserWriter opened an opportunity for someone like Quark to create professional page layout software that would allow anyone to buy a complete publishing system for less than 10% of that amount— including the hardware. Quark saw this as a way to put a publishing system into the hands of groups around the world who would otherwise have no voice. And of course, it was a way to make money. They astronomically succeeded with both of these goals — Quark had millions of users around the world and people in far-flung locations were publishing for the first time.
Today’s Quark has extended their original vision to support the current market. Their App Studio supports both QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign documents, allowing the vast majority of designers to afforably produce apps for iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android devices. App Studio relies on the open-source HTML5 for most of its output, which means it supports current digital devices and is ready to support emerging devices as they are made available.
By embracing open standards and partnering with leaders in the digital publishing business, Quark has nimbly grown their product line to meet the needs of not only traditional publishers, but also the giant market of in-house corporate publishing. Small publishers use QuarkXPress to affordably create e-books and mobile apps in addition to traditional printed publications. Large publishers use the “Quark Publishing Platform” (which includes QuarkXPress and/or Adobe InDesign) to manage and distribute vast amounts of information across every current medium.
So what is the Quark Publishing Platform? Quark’s website says it best:
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Whether implemented as an end-to-end publishing workflow or integrated independently with existing infrastructure, the modules of Quark Publishing Platform allow users to:
• Automatically assemble and deliver content to print, PDF, HTML5, Web, XML, tablet and mobile apps, and other digital formats.
• Reduce cycle-time by previewing content and interactive media in real-time while authoring in Microsoft Word.
• Design for automation using familiar layout and authoring tools.
• Easily integrate with syndication services and content management systems such as IBM FileNet Content Manager, Microsoft SharePoint, EMC Documentum, and others.
• Reuse and repurpose XML and structured content from third party systems.
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What this means is that users can use whatever tools they’re already comfortable with (Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, Microsoft SharePoint or other content management systems, etc.) to generate output for every current (and future) medium and format.
The parts and pieces of the Quark Publishing Platform have evolved over time. While it supports proprietary formats from Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and others, all the heavy lifting is done through open-source XML. Acknowledging that the vast majority of text in the publishing world is written in Microsoft Word, Quark provides Quark XML Author, an XML-authoring tool for Word that’s simple enough for any Word user. The idea is that writers and editors can assign XML tags to text in Word (similar to using Style Sheets), and then the marked-up text can be automatically transformed in various ways for multiple output media such as websites, newsletters, email, printed publications, smartphones and tablets.
All around the world, this system is being used by traditional publishers as well as government agencies, financial management companies, and manufacturers to ensure that their content is current and is used consistently throughout the organization.
Quark’s product line
https://www.quark.com/en/Products/
Besides Quark XML Author, other products that Quark develops and provides for this system include:
QuarkXPress 9 is Quark’s flagship product, capable of generating not only layouts for print, but also complex interactive graphics, e-books formatted for ePub, Kindle or Blio, and Web pages. It can also generate Flash® output, and apps for iPads, iPhones, Kindle Fire, and Android phones and tablets (with help from App Studio below).
QuarkCopyDesk is a standalone application for editing content in a QuarkXPress layout without altering the layout or requiring QuarkXPress. It’s used by editors and authors to place and edit content into existing QuarkXPress layouts, usually in a collaborative publishing environment such as Quark Publishing System, but is also used separately by organizations that want to save money by not purchasing a copy of QuarkXPress for workers who only need to edit text and pictures.
Quark Publishing System (QPS) is an editorial system that combines QuarkXPress, QuarkCopyDesk, and QuarkXPress Server, along with optional other modules, to write, edit, assign, track, design, lay out and publish publications.
App Studio is cloud-based (online) tool that lets designers and publishers combine content from InDesign, QuarkXPress, Microsoft Word (via XML), and HTML5, then add interactivity and output an app for iPads, iPhones, Kindle Fire, and Android phones and tablets.
Quark Brand Manager is a cloud-based tool that lets companies post templates that can be customized by employees, sales reps, franchise owners, and other authorized persons, then output to various formats or printed. The templates can be created from layouts produced in either QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. The idea is to provide visual materials that maintain the company’s brand while allowing nontechnical users to customize individual projects for specific uses and geographies.
Quark Web-to-Print System could be considered the “big brother” to Quark Brand Manager, in that it lets a company’s employees and partners generate all kinds of documents while maintaining corporate branding. It can also use variable-data printing to customize output materials, as well as generate ads of any size, using custom text, images and data. It outputs press-ready PDF, PDF/X, EPS, PostScript, Web PDF, and Flash® files, as well as QuarkXPress documents.
Quark DesignPad is a simple page layout app for iPads that let students or even professionals design grid-based pages, and then either share them as PNG graphics files or open them in QuarkXPress for additional manipulation.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Quark has undergone substantial changes in the past few years. Just after QuarkXPress 7 was released in 2006, Ray Schiavone was named President and CEO, a position he still holds six years later. Schiavone came to Quark from Arbortext, which he had built into a leading document automation company. He subsequently brought several key people from Arbortext to Quark.
Quark is and always has been a privately held corporation. In August 2011, Quark Inc. was acquired by Platinum Equity, and changed its name to Quark Software Inc. The Los Angeles Business Journal listed Platinum Equity as the largest private company in the Los Angeles area, and Forbes named them the 31st largest private company in America. Their founder is Tom Gores, who is listed by Forbes as one of the top 500 billionaires in the world.
Quark maintains offices around the world, including its main development and technical support center in Denver, Colorado: research and development in Santa Clara, California; technical support in Neuchatel, Switerland; development and support in India; offices in Germany, France and England.
The future
Quark’s current initiatives and direction are the same as always: the company exists to support designers and publishers with tools that are affordable, efficient, and easily upgraded for future technologies and formats. Today, this means helping them move toward digital publishing, create and publish interactive apps, and automate as much as possible to minimize labor costs, ensure that what’s being published contains the absolute most current information.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on December 27, 2012
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