I got my first Mac in November ‘89 and a friend gave me his copy of PageMaker (3, I believe). He didn’t know what to do with it and thought I might want to check it out. That version did only single-page files. Books weren’t even a thought yet.

You worked on your page in PageMaker on a metaphorical pasteboard, moving things around, locating them, selecting them with the mouse. It was intuitive in that you had that old-fashioned feeling of moving thigs around by hand. Sort of. Problem was that it wasn’t always easy to meticulously place things in tiny, accurate increments.

I read about QuarkXPress in one of the Macintosh magazines. It sounded more like a program for that today’s computer geeks, less like it was for refugees from the world of mechanical printing (as PageMaker seemed to be). This would have been version 2.something of Quark, I think.

The breakthrough was the ability to fine-tune placements, type size, and leading by typing precise numbers into dialog boxes. Sure, you could still mouse things around the pasteboard–I guess that metaphor wasn’t trademarked or under copyright.

But that changed everything. Oh, that, and the new ability to work on multipage documents.

So you can say what you want about preferring InDy-I haven’t used Quark in 3 or 4 years myself–but don’t disrespect it. We might not be having these exchanges today if Quark’s founders hadn’t had the vision they did.