Convert Quark to InDesign CS4 Using Markzware Q2ID InDesign Plugin
There are two main ways to convert Quark to InDesign
This article briefly shows how the Markzware Q2ID InDesign plugin works.First, select your Quark document. The spread shown below was created in Quark XPress 8. Make sure that all fonts are present and all images are correctly linked. You can do this by using the UTILITIES/USAGE... dialogue box. Once everything is present and correct, we can move onto InDesign.
Quark to InDesign Q2ID comes with two plugins, one for InDesign CS3 and one for InDesign CS4. Make sure you install the correct version into your InDesign PLUG-INS/FILTERS folder before starting InDesign. Once you've installed Q2ID and launched InDesign (you'll need to enter your Activation Code when prompted) a new menu item, "Markzware", will appear at the top of the screen. When I first installed the plugin into InDesign CS4, the Markzware menu item showed the following strange text:
This was resolved by closing InDesign, downloading the latest updated plugin from the Markzware site, re-installing it (by overwriting the old version) and re-launching InDesign. Then I was presented with the correct menu item as shown below:
Quark to InDesign Now you're ready to import your Quark file (any version up to Quark 8). My spread was imported very quickly, and although the resulting page wasn't perfect (no conversion ever will be), it was as good as any back-saving conversion I had ever carried out, and much faster. If I didn't have the plugin I would have had to back-save to Quark 7, open the file in Q7 and back-save to Quark 6, open Q6 and back-save to Quark 5, open Q5 in Classic and back-save to Quark 4, and finally open the Q4 file in InDesign. Never again! This progress bar does away with all that effort:
Quark to InDesign As Markzware states, no conversion will ever be perfect and there will always be work to do on the converted document. This one was no exception. Below is a comparison of a detail of the page (top is the converted InDesign file, and bottom is the original Quark file). Essentially the conversion was faithful. The Master Pages were retained, as were the Guides, Color Swatches and Style Sheets (called Paragraph and Character Styles in InDesign). However, some immediately obvious differences between the documents could be found in the hyphenation rules and the flow of the text.
Quark to InDesign Because the text styles were retained, the hyphenation and other tweaks could easily be fixed in the Paragraph Styles panel without having to select every block of text in the document. Below shows the hyphenation switched off in the Paragraph Styles:
Quark to InDesign Other glitches are quickly and easily resolved by scrutinising the document and tweaking widths and styles here and there. This can be time consuming, but it's still much quicker than re-creating the document from scratch. Here are the two finished documents for comparison (InDesign on top, Quark beneath).
And you're done! My opinion of Q2ID is that although the conversion isn't perfect, it does as good a job as the slower method of conversion, if not better (and it's much faster, obviously). More Information
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