[herbsman]

my friend who is a graphic designer is planning to purchase a new g5 this coming weekend, and he is considering buying adobe indesign over the latest offering of quark.the only setback is the compatibility issue between indesign and quark documents.

i'm trying to help him figure out how he will be able to use his existing quark projects (from os9 btw) within indesign natively if possible.

so the question is, does indesign open up quark files? if he has indesign installed and double cliks on a transferred quark document, will indesign be a good little trooper and open up the proprietary quark file? i doubt it, but he's convinced that it does.

i have a feeling that the solution to this is a file conversion within quark, maybe an eps conversion or something.

any help would be good. thanks

[voodoo]

Originally posted by herbsman:

so the question is, does indesign open up quark files? if he has indesign installed and double cliks on a transferred quark document, will indesign be a good little trooper and open up the proprietary quark file? i doubt it, but he's convinced that it does.

i have a feeling that the solution to this is a file conversion within quark, maybe an eps conversion or something.

any help would be good. thanks

The answer to your question is yes, InDesign can convert QuarkXPress documents to ID format. HOWEVER it isn't very good at it so many things will be a bit different in your friend's converted Quark doc in InDesign. He'll have to spend some time tracking down and manually correcting the errors. Granted this is easier than creating the whole document again, but it's still heck of a lot more headache than most people care for. Now a word of warning: some people here may say that converting XPress documents to InDesign was problemfree and painless for them. Perhaps they are telling it as it happened for THEM, but don't expect it to work smooth and painlessly FOR YOU (or your friend). It certainly wasn't problem free for me. It was in fact so much of a nuisance that I'm still using XPress.

So: it is possible to convert XPress documents to InDesign but it's probably going to take some time and work to iron out the conversion bugs.

Hope this helps!

[Helvetica Neue]

There's quite a bit of information about conversion at the following urls:

Adobe's info about the conversion

Some more info

Some troubleshooting if you run into conversion problems

HTH

[larkost]

My companies solution was to buy a single copy of Quark 6 for our final Quark project, and then go with InDesign for all the other computers. That one copy will serve to bring up old documents.

We found this to be a much better solution than bringing them in and having to re-touch everything (lots of problems)

[JacobyO]

Originally posted by larkost:
My companies solution was to buy a single copy of Quark 6 for our final Quark project, and then go with InDesign for all the other computers. That one copy will serve to bring up old documents.

We found this to be a much better solution than bringing them in and having to re-touch everything (lots of problems)

Are you sending ID files to your printer? If so had they already been accepting ID files or did you have to request it?

My biggest problem has been that I do a lot of magazine ads and most publishers don't accept ID files at all. Many of them are still using Quark 4.

[::maroma::]

Originally posted by JacobyO:
Are you sending ID files to your printer? If so had they already been accepting ID files or did you have to request it?

My biggest problem has been that I do a lot of magazine ads and most publishers don't accept ID files at all. Many of them are still using Quark 4.

Not sure if you've tried this, but for those lame printers/publishers that refuse to get with the times, I'd suggest sending them PDFs. InDesign is very nice for exporting PDFs from within the app.

As for Quark -> InDesign conversion, voodoo said it best. Technically it works, but if your document is heavy on type and type styling, you will probably have issues. InDesign handles type differently than Quark. Most of my projects are image heavy, and light on type so my conversions have been fairly painless.