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T
 he DHL Express agent looked me straight in the eyes, as if to say this wasn’t his fault, explaining, “I’m sorry sir, but according to our records, someone signed for that package. Someone named CHOP.”
I winced hearing this, knowing there would be no way to track that package now. I tried to explain to the agent that “CHOP” meant that someone had signed for the package in Chinese; it refers to the three-character name seal used to sign official documents in China. The agent just replied, “Sorry sir, nothing
I can do, the package has been delivered.”
This was the first piece of software I had ever lost en route after more than 30 years in the Canadian prepress trenches, in every position from operator to manager, from systems integration to technical support. Last December, I decided to use this experience to pull up stakes and move to Beijing, China, to be a Marketing Support Manager for Beijing Founder Electronics. Founder is China’s largest developer of software for the graphic arts industry and is the original developer of the Chinese font.
My work takes me all over the world and puts me in touch with people from every aspect of the graphics ecosystem, from distributors through to end-users. This has given me a global perspective on the printing industry and some surprising insights into the Asian prepress market, the one place InDesign has yet to gain a significant foothold. Quark still dominates this market, but not with QuarkXPress version 6, or version 5, or even the North American favourite XPress 4. Much of Asia’s prepress market is firmly rooted in a Mac OS 9 workflow based on none other than good ol’ QuarkXPress 3.32.
The reason XPress 3.32 dominates the market here is simple: it works. The complexities of expensive 2-byte Asian fonts have been tamed in OS 9, but this is a ticking time bomb for the Asian prepress industry: fewer Macs that can natively runOS 9 survive each year.
Another reason for application stagnation here in China is the proliferating bootleg software virus within the whole Asian prepress industry. Quark and Adobe have thrown up their hands in exasperation trying to compete with readily available cracked copies of their applications. It is rumoured that Quark was registering bootleg copies of XPress if their users would pay for the upgrade to the current version.
Much like in the Canadian industry in the late 1990s, most of the prepress expertise in the Asian print world resides in prepress houses still producing film for hoards of waiting printers. On any evening, Seoul’s busy streets are buzzing with aggressive couriers racing their motorcycle delivery trucks full of film and paper for printers running a night shift. No OS X, no CTP, no in-house prepress, a scarcity of skilled operators, bootleg software – this is a world stuck on OS 9 and XPress 3.32 despite of the diminishing pool of hardware they draw from.
Amid all of this relatively archaic prepress, I was very eager to get my hands on a full version of QuarkXPress 7, and so my frustration swelled over the courier and my missing package. I was reminded why this package is really Quark’s attempt to return to the desktop publishing limelight. Two weeks and several phone calls later (in both English and Mandarin), a package from Quark finally appeared on my desk while I was at lunch. My stomach full of jaozi (boiled dumplings), I smiled and opened the battered box: finally, something new from Quark.
Read the full story in the September 2006 edition of PrintAction |
