5 ms·

Interesting! I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper t

by boulos 7y ago

Interesting! I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”. Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?)

hrktb 7y ago
I get the feeling that a viable program produced locally was in itself a user feature. While other global programs could be shoehorned into their use case, it still means poor customizability for specific Korean issues. In particular being optimized for the most common Korean use case vs western designers use cases. There’s a lot of these local brew word processor in the CJK world, and it’s often more than just language support: there will be hooks for common legal formatting, better handling of common transformations, sometimes a dedicated IME working better for long form writing. It also means more culturally useful templates from first party source, which is surprisingly nice to have IMO. It’s also interesting that local companies/gov. can pay for additional features or adaptations, have the talent move to other entities in the local economy, etc. which is a way higher hurdle for an Adobe or Microsoft.
pcr910303 7y ago
> I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”. First of all, QuarkXPress had shitty, really shitty language support. You might be surprised when you know that most pro apps have really, really poor CJK support — apps like Photoshop currently has really hacky input support bolted on later, and frequently a problem. Even big, user facing apps like Microsoft Excel still has lots of problems with input. So back in the days where the word processor market was more diverse, QuarkXPress was not an option. Then also, there is the popularity problem where people have not used or even heard about DTD software like this, and it’s not really a friendly interface for users to create and modify documents. This is a side story but... publishers that needed DTD software used QuarkXPress back in the day. The company backing the software had frequent conflicts with the local publishers with license pricing, and the publishers decided to protest by not upgrading to the latest version — and AFAIK lots of small publishers that didn’t have the manpower to convert all of it’s files to InDesign still buys used PowerMacs to run the version(I’m not sure but something like 3.3 — released in 1996!) that they use. > Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?) > presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”. Yeah, pretty much true too. Having lots of templates in HWP is one of the reason why HWP isn’t disappearing; there is vendor lock-in due to custom file formats, and people don’t feel any reason to move to another one.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  partial story here -- lots of work was done on CJKV input systems, in each decade, but in many Asian markets (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam for SURE) piracy was rampant, which does not feed an R&D cycle. Unicode was standardized, then the utf8 format after that, which *nix took full advantage of, but other legacy software (see paragraph 1) did not evolve in some cases.
  - pcr910303 7y ago
    Piracy is rampant to all popular software; I’m not sure how the conclusion that Asian markets have a higher pircy rate than the western market was reached. I’m pretty sure that MS Office is pirated in the US at least as much as Korea.

by boulos 7y ago

hrktb 7y ago

I get the feeling that a viable program produced locally was in itself a user feature. While other global programs could be shoehorned into their use case, it still means poor customizability for specific Korean issues. In particular being optimized for the most common Korean use case vs western designers use cases. There’s a lot of these local brew word processor in the CJK world, and it’s often more than just language support: there will be hooks for common legal formatting, better handling of common transformations, sometimes a dedicated IME working better for long form writing. It also means more culturally useful templates from first party source, which is surprisingly nice to have IMO. It’s also interesting that local companies/gov. can pay for additional features or adaptations, have the talent move to other entities in the local economy, etc. which is a way higher hurdle for an Adobe or Microsoft.

pcr910303 7y ago

> I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”. First of all, QuarkXPress had shitty, really shitty language support. You might be surprised when you know that most pro apps have really, really poor CJK support — apps like Photoshop currently has really hacky input support bolted on later, and frequently a problem. Even big, user facing apps like Microsoft Excel still has lots of problems with input. So back in the days where the word processor market was more diverse, QuarkXPress was not an option. Then also, there is the popularity problem where people have not used or even heard about DTD software like this, and it’s not really a friendly interface for users to create and modify documents. This is a side story but... publishers that needed DTD software used QuarkXPress back in the day. The company backing the software had frequent conflicts with the local publishers with license pricing, and the publishers decided to protest by not upgrading to the latest version — and AFAIK lots of small publishers that didn’t have the manpower to convert all of it’s files to InDesign still buys used PowerMacs to run the version(I’m not sure but something like 3.3 — released in 1996!) that they use. > Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?) > presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”. Yeah, pretty much true too. Having lots of templates in HWP is one of the reason why HWP isn’t disappearing; there is vendor lock-in due to custom file formats, and people don’t feel any reason to move to another one.

mistrial9 7y ago
partial story here -- lots of work was done on CJKV input systems, in each decade, but in many Asian markets (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam for SURE) piracy was rampant, which does not feed an R&D cycle. Unicode was standardized, then the utf8 format after that, which *nix took full advantage of, but other legacy software (see paragraph 1) did not evolve in some cases.
- pcr910303 7y ago
  Piracy is rampant to all popular software; I’m not sure how the conclusion that Asian markets have a higher pircy rate than the western market was reached. I’m pretty sure that MS Office is pirated in the US at least as much as Korea.