Is There a Free Quark to InDesign Conversion Method?

The good news is if you want a free Quark to InDesign conversion tool, you'll find it built right into InDesign. The bad news is you can only import Quark version 4 files. If you're converting Quark to InDesign and you only have version 6 of Quark, you'll need to purchase a plugin - scroll down for more information. First though, find out if you have what you need for a free Quark to InDesign conversion:

Converting Quark to InDesign

So you've got archives full of Quark files and you've long since made the transition to InDesign... What do you do?

Recently I was working on an enormous book project for a publishing client in Greece. There were two 300+ page documents of fairly complex text and diagramatic content, both of which were nearing completion. During one of my conversations with the client it was revealed to me that the files had to be created in InDesign. Their in-house team had switched to InDesign entirely and they no longer accepted Quark files.

Potentially a complete nightmare... Both books had been created using Quark XPress 6. Did I panic? A little, perhaps. But I needn't have - using the procedure below I managed to convert both books without any problems. The positioning of all text boxes and images were the same, and with only the odd spacing glitch where I'd embedded images within text boxes, all was fine. I spent a lot of time checking each page, but not nearly as much time as I would have spent recreating the documents from scratch. And I found that InDesign ended up being much nicer (and more stable) to work with.

So it's perfectly possible to perform a free Quark to InDesign conversion; if a little long-winded! As I said, this assumes that files are Quark version 4... InDesign won't read version 5 or 6 files natively. So if the Quark file is already version 4, no problem. If it's version 5 or 6, read on!

Quark XPress 4 free Quark to InDesign conversion

Whether you're using InDesign CS1 or CS2, make sure you have the latest update from Adobe. For these free updates, Mac users click here and Windows users click here.

Once you have the latest update installed, all you need to do is select the Quark file through the File/Open InDesign menu, enable 'All Documents' instead of 'All Readable Documents' and it'll start converting. Done!

You might have to re-establish image links, but that should be about it. It will import most of the document information intact - and that's it! You can now save the file as an INDD file. Make sure you check the content carefully though - no conversion is perfect.

Quark XPress 5 free Quark to InDesign conversion

What about converting Quark 5 files? No problem. Open them in Quark 5 (which you will need), select File/Save As, and save the file as a version 4 file. Then you'll be able to open the file in InDesign as explained above.

Quark XPress 6 free Quark to InDesign conversion

How about converting Quark 6 files? No problem! Open them in Quark 6 (which you'll need!), and back-save it to Quark version 5 as demonstrated above. Then you'll need to open them in Quark 5 and back-save them to version 4! And then you'll be able to open them in InDesign.

The long and the short of it is that you'll be able to convert Quark files to InDesign, but the newer the Quark (QXD) file version, the more hoops you'll have to jump through.

Converting Quark to InDesign Commercially (CS3 and Q7)

The free Quark to InDesign conversion is fine, and will get you out of a hole - but what if you don't have earlier versions of Quark? Or what if you want something a little more convenient, and more thorough?

The answer is to look at the commercial possibilities. The only one I've had experience with is Markzware Q2ID , a conversion tool which checks the boxes missed by the native QuarkXPress to InDesign conversion.

Markzware have been a name I've been familiar with for years. My first experience of their software was with an early version of Flightcheck which scanned Quark files, images and fonts to ensure that everything that should be there was there (Quark didn't include fonts in the collect for output option until version 5).

This is what Markzware does very well - it looks for gaps in the big software titles and then they design the plugins and software to fill those gaps. Their customer service is excellent as well - I remember e-mailing a hurried message of to the support guys late on a Friday, not really expecting any help until the following week. They called back within two minutes - I've been a fan ever since!

Q2ID will convert versions 3.3, 4, 5, 6 and now 7 of Quark to InDesign CS2 and CS3 (Mac and Windows) in the same way that the native InDesign plugin converts version 4. Just select File/Open. However, Markzware are up-front about the fact that no conversion is perfect, and some reworking will probably be required.

So if you're looking for a perfect facsimile of the original, you'll be disappointed unless the document being converted is very basic. Any conversion will, however, save you an enormous amount of time which would otherwise be spent on recreating the Quark files manually.

What about converting InDesign to Quark?

Markzware cater for this requirement as well with Markzware ID2Q . This converts InDesign CS2 or CS3 to Quark 6.1 to Quark 7 (Windows and Mac).

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