Originally posted by jethroted
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you there. I am in the printing/design industry, and evryone I talk to from design houses, or other print shops pretty much feel the same thing. "Indesign sucks, and will never take Quark." I never get ID files to output. When I ask them why they don't switch, they said they tried it, and it stunk. I have no opinion on the matter as I have not tried it yet, but the people I talk to say the same thing.
You just confirmed something that is not an issue regarding InDesign's capabilities and it's modern architecture.
If printers rely on openning original Quark files and then ripping them, I only have to say they still live in stone age. That's a very, very, very old practice that yields poor results, because so many factors can ruin your design and final output. Missing or different font descriptions are just one issue.
Today, hi-quality printing houses accept PDF as a standard. It's platform independent, all design content you produce is inside of it, fonts, pics, page info, everything. It's perfect.
You're a designer, you should also know more about creating postscript files from any DTP applicaton, QuarkXPress, PageMaker, Illustrator or InDesign... So if you're able to create a correct PS files using settings provided to you by your printer, it really doesn't matter which tool you're using. You just provide them PS file (because they have to do the same thing from your Quark file, get it?) and that's it.
So, you see, we were actually talking about funtionality, which app is really better and more user-friendly in many different senses.
Printers, specially small printers, are people opposed to any positive change, and generally they are not ready to upgrade their services. They run ancient hardware, even more ancient software and they never upgrade their rip software. Screw them. They'll all die like dinousars did.