[rcantrell]

Hi all, the never ending switch is finally happening. We’re building all new projects in InDesign CS now that we’ve finally gotten our whole department up to OSX. We’re using Q4 in OS9 within the OSX shell for our regular work until we get the files switched.

But OS9 is fairly flakey at times so we’re thinking of using Quark 6.5 in the interim to InDesign.

Now, I’m aware that we won’t be able to open the Q6.5 files in ID. I figure that’s ok, since we’re trying to be as clean as possible and rebuild fresh in ID.

My Question is: is there anything in Quark 6.5 that you know is show stopping production problems.

Any feedback is welcome, and thanks to everyone who had responded to my initial inquires about InDesign several months ago.



Rosemary Cantrell

[KeriVit]

Rosemary, my department is in the same "weighing the options" mode. We are all running Q6 in the meantime. The most problems we have with Quark in OSX is fonts and Q crashing upon activation- the pdf export is crap for custom settings- redraw is a slow and deranged- writing to postscript can be iffy.

Now as for production stoppage- we are a prepress workfloe- running a Brisque 3. Quark 6+ and the Brisque don't play nice. Duotones, colorized tifs, spot colors, etc. don't RIP properly.

Not sure what your workflow is...

[rcantrell]

Wow! Okay, we noticed with our initial try at opening documents in Q6.5 that it said it was missing a bunch of fonts that are open in Suitcase. (which made us go hmm....)

Thank you for sharing your pain, er I mean experience. Maybe flakey OS9 is the lesser of the two evils.

As for our workflow, we are a marketing agency that sends out all of our printing so we’re not actually ripping the files, but of course if our vendors are going to have problems then in turn we have problems.

Thanks!
Rosie

[eyevaan]

you may want to search for this topic within the past two months. We hashed it out pretty hard. The ID decision is huge, many production shops still have not even migrated to OSX! Quark is still dominant and really that is not likely to change anytime soon.

I am impressed by your intrepid decision - my company is not so brave.

Q6 sucked. Q6.1 had little improvement. Q6.5 is better.

For PDFs you will need the Acrobat Panther PPD (ADPDF6-Panther.PPD) or the postscript will not distill properly. with that in place the watched folder scenario plays out fine.

curious about the OS9 wiggies - - - I do not experience that one. There is Quark extension called ClassicDraw XT 2.2 for QXP 4.x/5.x to help with redraw issues in classic.

If you are using Extensis Suitcase for font management you will need the classic extension (system folder - remember?) called Suitcase Bridge™ published by Extensis.

Let Suitcase manage the system fonts and you may need to manually replace Helvetica.dfont with Helvetica T1 (screen and postscript files) because the system seems to get a bit confused on switching one off while the other is being used in production programs.

[rcantrell]

We’re like many people who are unhappy with the Quark product and support. But I guess I wasn’t clear on this in my original post. (we own both Q6.5 and ID) I am trying to determine if we would be better served to use Q6.5 temporarily while we get our files (lots and lots) converted to ID instead Q4 in the OS9 shell. Thinking it would be more stable. But so far my research here and else where is saying stay in Q4 while the switching is going on. Unless something horrible happens we are commited to switching to IDcs.

Your comment: Quark still being dominant and not likely to change...

Thankfully, enough people are switching to ID and we do a high enough volume of work that it hasn’t been a huge problem getting our vendors to accept InDesignCS files. I’m still a bit nervous that some of our smaller vendors will have problems Ripping, but we’ll just have to see. We are still at the beginning stages of switching so I might revise this opinion, but so far so good.

Thanks for the info on the PDFs with Acrobat Panther PPD. I’ll definitely be passing that on to our tech guy.

As far as our OS9 wiggies, it’s just not super stable. (we’ve got all the suggestions you mentioned in place) I find Q4 in OS9 shell quitting every time I preflight and collect and other random times. We’ve also added people to our department and it’s difficult to justify and find outdated software and extensions for this (hopefully) temporary situation. It’s not the end all by any means.

It’s taken almost a year for our company to get to the point of both switching to OSX as well as moving to IDcs. It’s not been without tears, but so far (crosses fingers for good luck) we’ve been pleased with the results. Hopefully, we are being Brave in a good way and not in the way that will make me wish I was a greeter at a store.

Thanks for your input, I’m very interested to learn from everyone’s experience. I’ll keep everyone updated with our progress, also.

Rosemary

[eyevaan]

please let us know how the migration goes. very eager to hear about it.

also - if you find - even if it is a premium software - to convert QXD to ID, this would be most helpful, like the PageMaker to Quark extensions.