Despite all the gains and benefits of computer-to-plate (CTP) imaging and digital design, the process of creating compelling packaging designs is actually more complicated than ever. In the days of film, it didn’t matter what creative application you may have been using — Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXPress, for example — because in the end the creative work became film, which any packaging manufacturer could accept.

Then came CTP, and film stepped aside and allowed digital workflow to take center stage. No longer was film trafficked; rather, digital files became the means for exchanging packaging content. And suddenly, it became increasingly important what design application a creative director may be using, and what types of digital file formats a package printer may (or may not) accept.

There will always be loyal QuarkXPress fans, or loyal Adobe fans, who stick with their favorite creative application, no matter what the other developer may offer. But increasingly, there are greater numbers of package designers who find that it’s not a matter of choosing one application versus the other. Instead, they find themselves enmeshed in a creative workflow that requires the use of both Adobe’s and Quark’s solutions.

Design of the times
Caleb Clauset owns 2cdesign, a creative agency and consultancy based in Silver spring, MD. Clauset splits his time between managing the firm, creative design, and globe trotting on consulting projects for which he helps publishers, creative agencies, and printing businesses build the most efficient digital workflows.

Clauset has been a witness to the evolution of design tools for the graphic arts. “I actually started out in my career using Adobe PageMaker, but quickly switched over to QuarkXPress,” Clauset recalls. “I used QuarkXPress until 2001. But when Adobe introduced InDesign, I started playing with that, and evenutally switched over completely to InDesign.”

While Clauset continues to hold a license for QuarkXPress, he says, that he’s using the application less often. “I haven’t had the need to open up QuarkXPress in months,” he confides. “When I do it’s usually to do a little bit of document clean-up work before I use Q2ID.”

Q2ID is a plug-in from preflight Pioneer Markzware Software, in Santa Ana, CA., “I’d heard of Markzware’s Q2ID plug-in,” Clauset recalls, “which will let you bring an InDesign file into QuarkXPress. And I was just waiting for Markzware to come up with a tool that would let you do the reverse — pulls a Quark File into InDesign.”

Clauset admits that he was initially skeptical about any tool that promised a true conversion from one application to the next. “I was kind of reluctant to buy Q2ID at first,” he recalls. “I checked out the information on the Web site, and the documentation was pretty thin. I really wanted to now more about it before I plunked down $200.”

“But I had a job that I needed to turn around in a day, and I knew I needed this tool” Clauset continues. “If I had to recreate the file from scratch, in InDesign, I knew it owuld take me between eight and 10 hours.” Clauset soon discovered why the technical documentation for Q2ID was so “thin,” as he had called it.

“I bought the software, installed it, and found that the coolest thing about it was that it, too, is so thin!” Clauset affirms. “there’s no user interface and nothing to learn. Essentially, it does its job, but it’s completely transparent. It’s the best kind of plug-in. You install it, hit “File” and “Open,” and InDesign opens your document. That’s it.” For Clauset converting QuarkXPress documents to InDesign-friendly ones takes mere minutes, rather than hours of duplicating work that process once required. “Q2ID maps everything that Quark does to the InDesign equivalent,” he adds. “If it’s a table in Quark, it becomes a table in InDesign, and so on.”

Not long ago, Markzware put out a cry for Adobe InDesign users to send in their bad, corrupted or otherwise not responding documents. We have seem a steady stream of crashing InDesign documents coming in, which is to assist our R&D team in making a recovery Plug-in, similar to MarkzTools. Keep sending them (to pr at markzware dot com, for we are making incredible progress. Those who want to see how we fix them currently, visit this site and lastly, here is a video up-date on the recovery process. We show a huge file getting fixed.

Based in Cornelius, NC, The Moore Creative Company opened its doors in August of 1997 as a graphic design shop owned by Ran Moore and his wife, Jennifer. When the company was born, it was 100-percent devoted to graphic design for print intentions — an eclectic mix of jobs, from brochures and letterhead, to billboards and vehicle graphics. The company primarily targeted the local commercial and residential real-estate industries.

As the years unfurled behind it, the company evolved and grew beyond the geographical boundaries of North Carolina and its initially narrow Clientele focus. Today, The Moore Creative Company employs a staff of three designers, four developers, and a search engine marketer. Its clients represent a diverse roster of companies that vary in size, as well as industry. And what was once a print-centric workflow now is unevenly split, with 20 percent representing print output, and the 80-percent balance devoted to electronic and online media.

“We transitioned to more Web-site design and interactive Flash [and] animation work online, and later, to more e-mail marketing design,” Ryan Moore recalls “We probably hit the 50-50 split between print and online around 2001 or so, and now we do more jobs that start with electronic items, and that we’re suggesting print items to support or complement them — versus the other way around.”

It was a few years ago when The Moore Creative Company underwent a transition of another kind; it switched layout platforms, from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign. Moore says the revamp of the workflow went quite smoothly, overall, and the design team appreciated the synergies between Adobe InDesign and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite — Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. — they’d already been using.

The only “glitch” in the workflow was so minor it may not even be properly categorized as a “glitch,” and that was how to handle legacy content that needed to be reused or creative content submitted by clients that came in the form of native-application QuarkXPress files. Moore began a quest for a tool that would allow his creative team to reincarnate QuarkXPress files in Adobe InDesign, without having to essentially rebuild the layout, element by element.

It became imperative that he find a solution the day a new client brought in a QuarkXPress file from an older-version of the application. The job was a “rush,” and the creative team needed to extrapolate the content as quickly as possible in order to being working on it in Adobe InDesign.

“Rather than buy the new Quark or look for a friend to open it, we searched the Web and found [Q2id]. Thirty minutes later, we had our file converted and were on our way,” Moore recalls.

Developed by Markzware, Inc., http://www.markzware.com, Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign), is an inexpensive little Adobe plug-in with a self-explanatory name. Simply put, it enables user to open QuarkXPress files with Adobe InDesign, while preserving the elements and formatting, including page positiong, color models, fonts and styles, images, and more. Once installed, converting a file requires just a few familiar clicks: Within Adobe InDesign, users click on File, then Open, and choose teh QuarkXPress document they wish to convert.

“We purchased it either at the end of 2007 or early 2008 for a specific project [for which] we received files from the client — from another designer — that were in QuarkXPress 7,” Moore recalls. “It would have taken hours to rebuild and, instead, it took minutes to convert … It saved the day, and the budget!”

As time goes by, dealing with QuarkXPress-housed content becomes less of a concern for the team at Moore Creative. Ryan Moore estimates that a QuarkXPress file passes through the office approximately once every four months.

“It’s not something we use every day,” he notes, “but when we do need it, it’s been in an emergency rush situation, and Q2ID has saved the day … Zero problems. Exactly as advertised. And worked perfectly the first time,” Moore says of Q2ID. “that was the best part. It was so easy to use. Nothing complicated.”

 
Submit Your video (or photos) and Win!

That is right, simply video yourself (or have someone video tape you) at work and tell us:

*Who you are and what you do(name, title, company, specialty, etc)

*How you use your Markzware product(s)(FlightCheck, Q2ID, ID2Q, PUB2ID, MarkzTools, etc.)

*Be Creative! Show us around your work environment

(The more educational and informative, the better!)

For full details, go to the contest details

Email your entries to sales@markzware.com
If your attachments end up being larger than 2MB, simply email us for our FTP details.

Terms & Conditions for Contest:

* One submission per person of either a video explaining who you are and how (what) you use of Markzware and why it is so awesome, or a paragraph or two of text doing similar along with a photo(s) of yourself or your shop.

* VALID – Contest will run will June 15th. 2008 OR until 100 submissions have been received.

* All valid submissions will get a FREE T-SHIRT from Markzware! (shipped for free to you.)

* Email entries to: sales@markzware.com
NO attachments larger than 2MB please.-Email FIRST for FTP upload details.

* Photos can be in JPEG, GIF or PDF format and text supplied within email as plan text. 

by Claudia McCue
April 2008

If like many designers you are in the process of making the big switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign, you know it is not a trivial undertaking. You have to retrain your brain to a new way of working and remind your fingers which keys to hit for those newfangled shortcuts. You are in a hurry to get up to speed, and you have just been asked to create a client’s next newsletter in InDesign. The template for the newsletter is currently in QuarkXPress. You’ve finally come to that fork in the road: Do you build a new newsletter template from scratch, or do you take the easy way out and just open the file with InDesign? If there’s a lot of work in the template, go for File > Open. While it’s surprising this works at all, you should know what converts and what does not.

OPENING QUARKXPRESS FILES IN INDESIGN
Since the beginning, InDesign has had the ability to open QuarkXPress files created in versions 3.32 through 4.11—that hasn’t changed since InDesign One-Oh. What has changed, of course, is QuarkXPress itself; after all, we’re up to version 7.0 now. Yet InDesign CS3 still cannot open up documents created in QuarkXPress versions later than 4.11. Why is that? At the release of QuarkXPress 5.0, the file architecture of QuarkXPress documents changed—one imagines, to thwart opening by wily InDesign users.

Don’t blame Adobe for not providing a way to open late-model QuarkXPress files in InDesign: It was a matter of respect for the proprietary nature of a competitor’s file format. The solution, then, was for those scheming InDesign users to save QuarkXPress 5.0 documents as QuarkXPress 4.0 documents. That would have worked just fine, except that an awful lot of QuarkXPress users didn’t upgrade to 5.0. Many skipped that version and waited for QuarkXPress 6.0 to ship so they could finally use QuarkXPress under Mac OS X. And QuarkXPress 6.0 offered no method for saving to the ancient version 4.11 format. The bridge was out.

You’re probably acquainted with the fine folks at Markzware, who market the FlightCheck products I hope you’re using to preflight your files before you send them off to the printer. Markzware’s file conversion plug-in Q2ID (as in Quark-to-InDesign) is a plug-in for InDesign CS2/CS3 that allows users to open files created in all versions of QuarkXPress—up through and including version 7.0.

We’ll get back to the joys of Q2ID in a bit. First, you should know the basics of file conversion so you can be prepared for the process in general—and the results. Even though you’re probably dealing with QuarkXPress files of later vintage, put that aside for the moment so we can consider the issues you face in conversion, regardless of version. The following sections are based on conversions of QuarkXPress 4.11 files, without help from Q2ID.

Good news
Keep in mind that, even though it’s as easy as File > Open, converting a QuarkXPress file to InDesign is a translation process. And you know what happens when translations aren’t perfect. You’ve no doubt read poorly translated handbooks for electronics: “Please to not be pressing ON with this hairs dryer when the bathing will happen.” You get the idea.

That said, a lot of things survive the trip:
1. Document structure is intact. That is, facing pages don’t come unglued, and no pages disappear.

2. Picture boxes become InDesign graphics frames and retain any content (but see the Not-so-good news section for some caveats).

3. Text boxes become InDesign text frames.

4. Character and Paragraph styles become InDesign styles.

5. Master pages become InDesign master pages.

6. Guides are retained at proper locations.

7. Box borders and lines are translated to the closest InDesign styles. Dashed borders may change pattern (short dashes may become long dashes), and the fancy bitmap borders, such as the Certificate and Yearbook styles, become solid strokes. (Hey, you shouldn’t be using those tacky things anyway!)

8. Groups remain intact, unless there are nonprinting objects in the group. If a group contains nonprinting objects, none of the objects (whether printing or nonprinting objects) will be grouped after the conversion. But any nonprinting objects retain their nonprinting attribute.

9. Multi-ink colors are converted to mixed inks in InDesign. However, if the multi-ink color doesn’t contain a spot color component, it’s converted to a plain old process color.

Not-so-good news

Now that you’re in a good mood, let’s take a look at the somewhat less rosy side of conversion.

1. You cannot open QuarkXPress libraries or book files. (You can, of course, open the individual QuarkXPress documents that are governed by a book file.)

2. There is no support for Microsoft OLE objects (Windows).

3. Transformations may not be identical; i.e., an image scaled at 112.3 percent might be scaled at 108.9 percent after conversion.

4. The position of transformed images may be incorrect within their frames.

5. Flex spaces become standard en spaces.

6. Trapping settings are lost.

7. Embedded graphics are not converted—for example, images that have been copied/pasted into QuarkXPress.

8. InDesign has no type style equivalent to the Superior style in QuarkXPress (often used for dollar signs). After conversion, superior characters become full-size characters with the Superscript attribute.

9. Content created by third-party XTensions may not convert correctly. If a file fails to convert, or crashes InDesign during conversion, an XTension may be the villain. Open the file in QuarkXPress, delete the content created by the XTension, resave the file and attempt the conversion again.

Text reflow

The most common complaint about QuarkXPress-to-InDesign conversions is that text reflows. Quark-XPress uses single-line composition; that is, it makes line-by-line decisions. InDesign looks at paragraphs as a whole, which is why it sets smoother text. But moving from one composition environment to the other results in text reflow. If you don’t mind the change in line breaks, fine. But if you need to replicate the line breaks from the original QuarkXPress document, try switching to InDesign’s Single Line Composer. Click in a paragraph (or select a range of paragraphs), open the Paragraph panel (Window > Type and Tables > Paragraph), and choose Adobe Single Line Composer from the panel menu. There’s no guarantee this will restore the same line breaks as the original QuarkXPress file, but you may find it easier to massage line breaks in the single-line mode. See figure 1 for a comparison of the original QuarkXPress document, a straight conversion and a conversion using Markzware’s Q2ID.

USING THE Q2ID PLUG-IN

Installing Markzware’s Q2ID plug-in for InDesign adds quite a bit of functionality. In addition to allowing you to open up even late-model QuarkXPress files (including version 7.0), Q2ID refines the conversion of QuarkXPress documents of all vintages. For example, the Superior type style is resolved, resulting in correct text size and position. Transformed graphics are correctly converted, without the position shifts and slight size changes that plague an unaided conversion. You’ll still probably experience some reflowed text, but you’ll find that Q2ID definitely reduces the amount of massaging necessary after conversion.

If you frequently need to convert QuarkXPress files, I recommend you check out the product information at www.markzware.com/q2id, and request a demo. I don’t get a kickback. I’ve happily spent my own money to buy Q2ID and couldn’t live without it. It’s available for Mac and Windows. There’s also an XTension for QuarkXPress users who want to convert InDesign files to QuarkXPress.

BEST PRACTICES

There’s more to conversion than just choosing File > Open: You should prepare for the conversion, and it’s wise to perform some cleanup afterward.

Before: Start with healthy files

Whether you’re using the Q2ID plug-in or not, before performing the conversion you should make sure the original file is healthy. In QuarkXPress, make sure that all pictures are updated, and all needed fonts are active. Make a PDF of the file so you have a “snapshot” for checking the conversion. Resolution isn’t important; you’ll just use the PDF to check line breaks and art position. Save and close the QuarkXPress file.

After: Check your work

In InDesign, choose File > Open and select the QuarkXPress file (remember, it has to be v. 3.32– 4.11). Create a new layer, and place the PDF you created earlier. To place all the pages of a multipage PDF, check the Show Import Options box in the import dialog. Set the Crop option to Trim, and position the placed PDFs at the upper left-hand corner of each page. Check the Transform proxy to make sure the PDF is positioned at the 0,0 point so you can use it to accurately check the position of text and graphics in the converted file.

Check the results of the conversion:

1. Toggle the visibility of the layer you created to hold the referenced PDF pages, and note what differs from the original file. To better see all the details, choose View > Display Performance > High Quality Display.

2. Modify unwanted line breaks and text reflow.

3. Take a quick look in Preview mode (View > Screen Mode > Preview, or press the W key on the keyboard) to check for nonprinting objects
(they’ll disappear in Preview mode).

4. Check text wrap: Remember, InDesign allows objects to generate text wrap regardless of stacking order, whereas QuarkXPress limits text wrap to objects beneath text.

5. Massage the positions and scale of graphics as necessary. See figure 3 for a typical image shift that may affect some scaled or rotated images.

Polishing off the rust

Before you start building the next newsletter atop your freshly converted file, it’s a good idea to perform a purification ritual to ensure future file health. Choose File > Export, and select InDesign Interchange for the format. InDesign will create a file with the .inx extension. Close the working file, and then open the .inx file. Choose File > Save As, and, if you intend for this file to serve as the basis for future documents, choose InDesign Template for the format. InDesign will create a file with the .indt file extension. Otherwise, just save as a regular InDesign file.

Why do I advocate this extra step? It’s based on past experiences with converted files. I’ve encountered numerous neurotic files that began life as converted documents (as if they’d had a troubled childhood), and they’ve benefited from the Interchange route. I do think files converted with Q2ID are more stable to begin with (at least I seem to have fewer issues with them), but it’s still a good idea to get the best start possible.

Figure 1:

In the original QuarkXPress text, the dollar sign and double zeroes use the Superior type style. Note line breaks in the body text, and the space between the price and the body text. The middle example was converted without the Q2ID plugin. Note line breaks and reduced space between the price and the body text. The example on the bottom was converted with the Q2ID plug-in. Note the Superior text has been corrected, although line breaks are still incorrect.

Figure 2: Choose the pages of a PDF you’d like to place. Separate the range with dashes (1–8), and separate noncontiguous pages with commas (1–8, 10–12). Position the reference PDFs exactly, using the coordinates for the Transform proxy in the Control panel.

Figure 3: Note the crop position in the original QuarkXPress file. Because the image is scaled in QuarkXPress, the initial InDesign conversion (bottom, center) results in a shifted position. Markzware’s Q2ID, however, retains the correct crop position during the conversion.

SIDEBARS:

Recommended resources

Markzware Q2ID
Information: www.markzware.com/q2id

Adobe InDesign CS3
Conversion Guide:
www.adobe.com/designcenter/indesign/articles/indcs3ip_quarkmigration.pdf (geared toward QuarkXPress users making the switch, but includes a section  on converting QuarkXPress files)

Adobe Guide to Converting QuarkXPress files:
http://tinyurl.com/34jzzg

Claudia McCue is a consultant, trainer and writer focused on the practical aspects of designing for print. She is author of Real World Print Production (Peachpit Press) and a frequent presenter at industry conferences.

Reviewed by Macintosh Users East.

I recently saw a video on the internet which featured a designer who had created an Adobe InDesign document that had somehow become corrupted. Eventually the file refused to open in InDesign.

Ordinarily an event like this would be disasterous to a layout artist, especially if the document were a huge commercial layout for a magazine or a book.

Since the file would not open he could not even revert to a saved copy. Instead of starting all over again the designer launched QuarkXPress (more)

Pass this out and share the Markzware Theme song with all your friends!

You may not have known that Ron Crandall, co-Founder of Markzware is an artist and accomplished musician. Listen and enjoy

A few years ago, I visited Dalim Software in Strasburg with my colleague, David Dilling. This is the home of Gutenberg. (Check it out as we wondered allowed Would Gutenberg have use FlightCheck?)

We have heard of many creatives and designers starting to use FlightCheck to check their web banners before posting.

This video explains the quick and easy process of batch checking images files to ensure either web or print quality. Users of Photoshop or other image editing tools, should love this one!