[LeopardWoman]

I've been pouring over this whole Quark/ID issue, which has gone on for so long now - I am a design instructor with a major university, and a user of both programs. But quark is only still a part of the curricula because I have kept it there. My fellow faculty were devotees of pagewrecker and ridiculed my fervor over quark. I came out of design school right as desktop publishing got it's start and was using quark along with pagemaker and ventura publisher at one time. Of those, it didn't take long to see that quark was IT. And I happily and productively used it as my software of preference for years. 3.32 was perhaps the apex of functionality and streamlined features with minimal stuff I didn't need from the program.
I returned to my undergraduate school a few years later to work as an AD and was shocked to find that the whole campus and greater area was using only pagemaker. They looked at me as if I were crazy to request our underfunded department by a copy for me to use. I told them that the savings in prepress would quickly recoup the investment. And I was right. Not only did I get cheaper printing estimates from every company I dealt with, I soon learned that these firms that didn't have dedicated trapping software were using quark as a makeshift way to trap pagemaker files. The glee on my face when our CD got proofs with a little .qxd extension.
As of 2000, I began teaching instead, but continued to do (and still do) a lot of freelance. In a ten year period by then, I had created perhaps as many as 10,000 quark documents. I lost one. ONE. And never forgot a linked file to the printer. It just worked. It didn't really matter to me that service was bad because I DIDN"T NEED THEM.
But here it is 2005 and things are very different. Printers are starting to give me a hard time for sending quark files. My students do a printing project in it and the vendor about has a heart attack every time the files arrive because they know what a fight they will have with their RIP. Our design departments and even the school paper have switched to ID CS. I'm becoming villified for the same reason I appeared saavy ten years ago.
There are many things about the program that I still liked, especially when dealing with students that love to use features and do things not because they should, but becasue they CAN. Like native files in layout - destined for postcript errors. Many other examples...I told them that quark was keeping them honest and making a cleaner final file. But I have serious stability issues with 6.5. For those of you that have also had problems, try using a server-based version of it without benefit of cable/t1/dsl connections like I have to deal with at a remote home location.
At a design workshop in CA a few years ago I had a chance to lunch with an adobe developer..we were discussing why pagemaker continued to linger despite their efforts to kill it, and the positioning against quark. OS X was new, and they were coming off a bad release of ID 1.5. He told me they were aggressively marketing to printers, prepress houses that were skeptical of the programs ability to go through RIP. It clearly worked. WHiel talking to other CDs and ADs at the same conference, one from NYC (cannot recall her name) was considering switching her firm to ID. She said it best about quark:"Never has a compnay been so hated by a group that so needed it".
The writing may indeed be on the wall...my students hope so, even those that have no experience with either program. But in my immediate area, quark use may be down to 1%...it be much less if I throw in the towel and begin using ID in earnest. I - and so many others like me - just want a clean, simple, fast layout program like we had back in 3.32. Sure, we love collect for output, fonts, etc. But forget the XML and the rest of what Turpin spoke of. Just give us out fast, stable program back!
I really don't want to switch, but I am rapidly getting to the point where I will have to or else relocate!

[LeopardWoman]

I wish you could act as a consultant for preflight of quark files for our campus printer...they really hate seeing me come through the door with yet another quark file to output. Since the upgrade to 6.5, they cannot easily convert to ID in the version they are running now (perhaps CS?). Very frustrating to know I prepped the files perfectly but have them not work correctly on their RIP.

[LeopardWoman]

Freehand...a good program run over by adobe and inferior ilustrator. Nothing like a well-priced bundle to turn the tide. Another example of a program I prefer to use personally but am not teaching due to it's lack of market share in the job market my students will soon be entering. They learn quark and ID, but that may soon change too.