Epic battles always have an underdog. And the longer the war goes on, the more the underdog learns that wile and persistence may lead to victory.

In the battle that is Adobe Systems and Quark Inc., it's not clear which company is David to the other's Goliath. And the secret weapon in this battle may turn out to be the Web.

In the page-layout arena, Quark has always been the dominant warrior. In fact, two years ago this month -- on the eve of Seybold Seminars in San Francisco, which returns next week -- the privately held and cash-rich Quark Inc. made a vaunted attempt at a hostile takeover of Adobe, whose stock was pitching. Adobe was under fire at the time for failing to understand and position its products for the Web.

Fast forward one year to 1999: This time last summer, again at Seybold Seminars, a rejuvenated Adobe released InDesign, which it called "the new standard in professional publishing for the next millennium." Indeed, InDesign included some exciting breakthrough features, such as an extensible open architecture, sophisticated typography, and flexible master pages.

And where are we today? Adobe Systems has rebounded successfully, and the Number One graphic arts software vendor has had how many --eight? I've lost count -- record-breaking quarters, consistently reporting earnings above and beyond expectations. And yet that plucky gladiator QuarkXPress is still the Number One page-layout application for the graphic arts industry.

What gives? Why isn't Adobe InDesign the Quark-killer that the company promised, and why hasn't the San Jose software giant made any significant in roads against the Denver company it would so love to topple?

The Comeback Kid
Personally, I never put much stock in the Quark takeover attempt. That company's management is enigmatic, but I'm fairly certain it was a publicity stunt. I don't even give Quark credit for issuing a wake-up call to Adobe. The pressure on Adobe came from other sources, because it hadn't equipped Photoshop with features for preparing images for the Web, because it hadn't coughed up a graphical Web-page design application, and because it wasn't seamlessly integrating HTML into its design applications (FrameMaker being the exception), among other problems.

Indeed, Adobe made its comeback because it (finally) focused on the Web, with products like ImageReady and GoLive and, more recently, LiveMotion. But that only explains half of the equation. If Adobe is doing so well, why can't it pull that darn Quark thorn out of its side?

First, InDesign 1.0 left much to be desired. It was plagued by drawbacks, and no respectable print publishing outfit would drop an established, functional page-layout application to switch to new software that was slow, lacked some service bureau-required features such as built-in trapping, and proved more cumbersome to use to execute some routine tasks. In fact, one of the paradoxes of InDesign 1.0 is that it generated PDF without going through Acrobat Distiller, but unfortunately the PDF it generated wasn't as consistent and reliable as what Distiller produced.

InDesign 1.5, released just six months after 1.0, fixed many of these problems, adding some goodies like the Pen and Eyedropper tools, a multi-language dictionary, and PDF styles. But it still lacks long-document features and the capability to combine spot and process colors; it still requires some hefty hardware; and users still report problematic PDF output.

Adobe also had a public relations snafu when it attempted to charge $99 for the upgrade and users cried foul. But the fact is, Adobe should have called it InDesign 2.0 -- the upgrade included more than 70 new features, after all. That way, Adobe could have charged what it wanted while at the same time demonstrating a commitment to the product, having put it on an aggressive development cycle. The company does, after all, face the tough challenge of converting sophisticated users of a long-established workhorse of a competing product. And no matter how much publishers may dislike Quark's customer support -- although the company has been applying spit and polish to its tarnished image -- they're a rational bunch, and they're not going to throw a wrench into an established workflow because of emotion. In other words, publishers won't switch allegiances until InDesign proves itself as a mature, robust, and functional application.

Time Will Tell
Should you ask, dealers will tell you that InDesign sales have been sluggish since inception -- for many, InDesign is one of their worst-selling Adobe applications, down there with Streamline and Dimensions; users will tell you that they may have bought InDesign out of curiosity but that they haven't integrated it into their workflow or replaced QuarkXPress; and even Adobe (quietly) admits that InDesign won't meet its target revenue this year. Still, like Adobe, I believe that eventually InDesign will prevail.

Certainly, the company isn't doing much to instill great confidence right now, what with its being busy suing Macromedia for patent infringement, and (apparently) killing PressReady.

But the company has an ace in the hole with Acrobat and the PDF format: PDF is such a versatile, clean, and just plain useful file format that it is going to continue to carry Adobe to new heights, whether it be as a print-production format, online-publishing format, or e-book format. I love to watch version upgrades for each Adobe product, as their interfaces become more similar, as they more fluidly interrelate, as they migrate toward seamless exchange and generation of PDF. Ultimately, InDesign will be the cornerstone of that cohesive, streamlined PDF workflow.

PDF vs. XML
Quark, meanwhile, is putting its eggs in another basket: XML. Avenue.quark, an XTension that lets users describe and export XPress content in XML format, is now available, and "media-independent" publishing, enabled by XML, will be the selling point of QuarkXPress 5.0. Indeed, media-independent publishing is the "nucleus" of Quark's strategic vision, the company says.

While I don't discount the role that XML plays in online publishing, I just don't think it's enough to let Quark maintain its leadership in the page-layout market. XML is the domain of programmers and developers, not graphic artists and designers. So all of those print-centric page-layout customers, Quark's bread-and-butter market, just might balk at upgrading to XPress 5.0. They're apt to pass on QuarkXPress 5.0 and XML and gravitate instead to InDesign and PDF -- and the whole suite of integrated Adobe applications that they already know and use. And they'll trust Adobe to bring them XML publishing capabilities, elegantly executed, if and when they're ready to adopt them.

The competition between Quark and Adobe is fierce and far from finished, and the two companies are warily circling one another, looking for a misstep. There may be surprises next week at Seybold Seminars -- I wouldn't put it past either company to stun the audience with a new tactic. That's what makes epic battles so compelling.

Read more by Anita Dennis.