🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve, 

I'll go ahead and answer your question based on the assumption that you were asking about the scripting capabilities of the two applications. 

As of late, it seems that InDesign is rapidly becoming the publishing package of choice for professionals in every field. Long-time Quark users are beginning to switch over to InDesign, oftentimes based strictly on it's incredible support for scripting (on both platforms, unlike Quark, which only supports AppleScript). Quark also requires XTensions for AppleScripting. As an experienced publishing software professional who is still fairly new to scripting, I can irrefutably say that Quark's scripting support pales in comparisson to InDesign's. Scripting with Quark is clumsy, far from intuitive, and I have known several colleagues who gave it up altogether. 

Having that said, and in consideration of the fact that Quark 5.0 is still an OS9-exclusive application (which I mention because it doesn't speak too highly of their timeliness), I think the choice is relatively simple if your primary concern is saving precious time and money through automation. InDesign has a much more extensive (and better) scripting manual, support for Mac and Windows, and forum support  (which is probably the most helpful of all), not to mention a host of other features that make InDesign the only choice for productivity enhancement. 

Does that answer your question? 

-Benny