[jethro710]

Were in the early stages of switching from quark 6 to indesign. I know that ID could open quark 4 files, but since the vast majority of our work in in quark 6, I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on opening those files in indesign? Any help or ideas would be great.

Thanks

[Chuckit]

If you can get a copy of Quark 5, it would be possible to do a chain-downsave (have Quark 6 save as Quark 5, then have Quark 5 save as Quark 4). But I'd recommend you take a look at InDesign's Quark-import feature. In my experience, it has a lot of compatibility problems.

Don't get me wrong, I like InDesign over Quark and it is my program of choice, but if you have a lot of documents you need to convert, this could be a significant issue.

[siMac]

There are really two problems here.

1. Downsaving from XPress 6 to 5, then 5 to 4 can cause problems of its own since any new features that have been used need to be backwards translated.

2. Opening the XPress 4 file in InDesign can also cause issues, although InDesign will try and warn you of them after conversion.

Bottom line is this - if you have an old job in XPress 6 that you need to make a small change to and run again, keep it in XPress 6. If, however, it is a regular job that is often updated then it's worth spending a little bit of time converting it to InDesign and checking it thoroughly so that you can use InDesign for that job in the future.

[larkost]

When the company I was working for made the move we did it on new projects. Old projects we kept in Quark, but all new work was done in InDesign. That allowed the transition to be more gradual (and drove one of the designers batty with the slightly different quick-keys... *chuckle*). Once the move was done, everyone was happy about it.

[theolein]

Another option would be to save the work as PDF, would it not? Export from Quark6 to PDF or Postscript, then use Distiller or another tool to make the documents into an Indesign friendly format.

[Randman]

I would think the fewer steps involved in transferring items, the better. Fewer chances for something to go wrong. I've had quite a few *little* things get thrown out of whack when converting from Quark 4 to ID.

[CaptainHaddock]

I concur with most of the others. Simple Quark documents can be down-saved to version 4 and then converted in InDesign. For complex projects, slowly phasing in InDesign might be better. Content that doesn't need to change can be exported as PDF and imported as an image in InDesign.

Once you're used to InDesign, you'll probably loathe Quark. I've redone entire projects in InDesign just so I wouldn't have to mess with Quark.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Randman:
I would think the fewer steps involved in transferring items, the better. Fewer chances for something to go wrong. I've had quite a few *little* things get thrown out of whack when converting from Quark 4 to ID.

I've never had a clean import from Quark to InDesign in anything but the very simplest documents. Tracking is all thrown off, images wind up completely off center in their bounding boxes, and rounded boxes are converted to true bezier curves (i.e. ovals) rather than squares with curves on the corners.