QuarkXPress

Since I first used this software in college (which was more than a while ago) although it has changed and evolved in my opinion it has never stopped being the best layout creation tool there is. I've used it over the years professionally across all kinds of projects and niches and even personally to create materials for the kids' soccer teams etc. And customer service always has been truly top notch, something that is increasingly rare these days.

The newer Adobe integrations can be annoying and for my purposes not that helpful. Yes, there are days when I wish it had never happened but not to the point that I will actively go looking for something else as an alternative.

If you work on book, or you need HTML5 or android/iPhone version of your publication, without additional costs, choose QuarkXPress. In one program you can do everything you need to satisfy your publishing needs. But, if you need more "artistic" look of your publication, Adobe and Affinity suites, even Corel, are better solutions.

It is slow as slow as you hardisk, not your CPU or graphic card. QuarkXPress use too many time more hd than memory cache. Second "least" is price, and it cost too much, and there are no upgrade for 50% or more offs.

After Apple’s Pages application, it is the easiest and simplest major print design software out there that you can use fairly intuitively if you’ve used a computer graphics program before. Just watching some tutorials online you can easily edit other people’s work fairly easily without much training.

The second best feature of quark is the powerful xtentions that exist out there on the market. Other programs had this too but quark was the first to do this. Xtentions really streamlined and automated a lot of repetitive design tasks like updating prices and phone numbers (xcatalog).

It lacks full transparency gradients and doesn’t have adequate photo layering capabilities like opacities and layer modes. It also lacks a wysiwyg font menu so you can’t see they style of the font you’re using until you select it and enter some type. Quark is also a bit unstable at times. Prone to crashes.

I like that Quark allows you precision control over text input in documents. It is especially useful in art projects that are text intensive. I like it best for direction labels, books, pamphlets, magazines etc.

I don't find that Quark is near as useful for laying out package design projects. It suffers when compared to Adobe Illustrator for setting up art for boxes, product logo labels or flexible packaging of various types (multi-wall bags, form and fill bags, pouches, etc.). It just is not functional for package design and I have found it is limited in its post script adaptability.