Why we only supply templates in Quark Xpress

Why don't you supply templates in Illustrator?

Technically, it's possible to do page layout in Illustrator.  It's also possible to hammer nails with a crescent wrench, but we recommend that you use a hammer instead.

Illustrator is an illustration program - an excellent one - but it isn't intended to for use as a page layout application. Adobe has other programs engineered for page layout: InDesign and Pagemaker. There are a number of ways that working in Illustrator is less efficient than working in a dedicated page layout program like Quark Xpress or InDesign.  For example, an Illustrator file with several placed TIFFs can take a minute or more to open. The same layout in Quark might open in less than a second. There are also a number of reasons why Illustrator layouts are notoriously troublesome at the prepress stage. For instance, it may be necessary to edit a placed raster [Photoshop] image, but it may not be possible if the designer has embedded the file and failed to supply a copy.

Preflighting Illustrator files is time-consuming; when we get a layout in Illustrator, we know that we are going to have to spend twice as long as we would like checking it over, and that means that we'll have to charge the client accordingly. We don't supply Illustrator templates because we don't want to encourage people to use it for anything other than illustrating (although we will accept finished layouts prepared in it). If we made it any more tempting to use Illustrator for page layout, we'd be irresponsibly causing needless waste and expense.

Why don't you supply templates in Photoshop?

Photoshop is an amazing program, but it's totally inappropriate for page layout. You can't put vector artwork, such as fonts or Illustrator graphics, into Photoshop files without rasterizing them.  Typesetting is an exercise in exasperation, and type set Photoshop usually has to be halftoned, causing it to look considerably worse than it would if it were set in a page layout file. A page with nothing but text and a single color graphic is almost impossible to prepare properly, and takes many times longer to print than it would if it were set up in Quark. There are a thousand other reasons... in the end, it's a raster image editing program, not a page layout program.

Why don't you supply templates in Pagemaker?

Ah, good question. Pagemaker, unlike Illustrator or Photoshop, is actually engineered to handle page layout. The problem with Pagemaker is it's age. It was one of the first desktop publishing tools, and it contains lots of gnarly legacy code. Adobe chose to develop InDesign from scratch because Pagemaker's ancient code base was too difficult to update. From a prepress standpoint, Pagemaker's instability and unreliability make it less desirable than the alternatives. It ain't known as Ragemaker, Painmaker, and Pagebreaker for nothin'!

Why don't you supply templates in Freehand?

Freehand is a strange hybrid; it's an illustration program, but it has some elements of page layout software built in. We don't supply Freehand templates because there isn't a lot of demand for them.  Keeping a library of templates up to date requires a considerable investment in staff time, and we can't justify such an expenditure to serve the small population of Freehand partisans.

Why don't you supply templates in InDesign?

We will soon, but we don't support InDesign yet.