The CS2 release in 2005 arguably represented an eclipse of Quark for the desktop product, but even more exciting for us, we finally got the InDesign Server that we’d begged and pleaded for during the previous five years. Bundled pricing was a commercial blow to Quark as well. But as of the release of “CS1,” the InDesign product was attaining parity with Quark, and surpassing it in some respects, most notably in its incredible exposure to automation. There is just so much convenience to easily interfacing with the industry-standard formats for raster images (Photoshop), vector art (Illustrator), and output (PDF/PostScript)… even if InDesign had enjoyed less composition quality than Quark, there would still be arguments to choose it. The creation of the “ Adobe Creative Suite” highlighted the advantages InDesign had over Quark. Initially, these were fairly siloed products, but around 2000 Adobe had begun making them more interoperable, with a Core Tech department enabling shared code libraries. They owned PostScript, PDF, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat. Adobe enjoyed such an incredible competitive advantage over Quark, first in terms of resources, but critically in terms of their monopoly in related software. Simultaneously, we also watched the Quark user base decline evermore with each fresh release of InDesign. Quark DDS was the closest in output quality, but suffered from a lack of openness to automation.
While we attained scale, (for example generating 10 million long complex documents in a very short period of time with FusionPro), try as we might, we could not attain the quality of output offered by InDesign desktop. We begged Adobe for an InDesign Server, as we worked with their newly released Altercast, Document Server, and FrameMaker Server, all of which had rough edges of their own. We also automated InDesign desktop, which gave us fantastic quality of output, but at the price of ridiculously slow speed. When we started Silicon Publishing in 2000, we tried every flavor of composition server in existence: Quark DDS, FusionPro, GMC, PageFlex, Exstream, Scene7, PDF libraries, XSL-FO engines, SVG tools, raster imaging libraries… you name it. Historyīefore Adobe offered anything in the way of server-based page composition, the Silicon Publishing co-founders were producing billions of pages of output a year using ancient tools such as Xyvision, VIPP, and 3B2. Currently, we build the largest solutions in the world for database publishing and online editing, and we have worked with a broad range of tools for document and image generation. We at Silicon Publishing have been working in the database publishing and online editing space for over twenty years, since the very birth of desktop Adobe InDesign, and long before the initial release of InDesign Server in 2005.
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