QuarkXPress 6.0: The Number Of The Beast

October 12, 2005 12:07 PM

I want to migrate an irritatingly large number of QuarkXPress 6.0 publications to InDesign. What are my options? What are your recommendations?

These are mostly multi-page pieces of product literature. There are a lot of them, but I am tired of Quark and I am under the impression that InDesign is now "ready for prime time." What am I looking at in terms of time investment here? Are there good tools available that make it possible to convert/import Quark files into InDesign?

All insight is most welcome.

posted by killdevil to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

When I migrated to InDesign it was capable of importing Quark files at version 4. Looking at the menu (CS1) now it says it supports 3.3-4.1, but that may (or may not) have been expanded in CS2. I simply downgraded the necessary files from to v4 and imported them, everything translated well.

The scripting is supposed to be rather nice (compared to Illustrator) for InDesign, and that's always a good thing to look into when dealing with mass conversion. I suppose the deciding factor is how many features you lose by downgrading and importing the files versus setting up new templates and stripping the information in another fashion.
posted by prostyle at 12:18 PM on October 12, 2005

When I had a similar problem, I down-versioned like prostyle said. Be aware that unless the original documents are ludicrously simple, the InDesign document you wind up with will need shitloads of tweaking. Pretty-fying converted Quark files can sometimes be more work than rebuilding the page from scratch in InDesign.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:03 PM on October 12, 2005

Markzware has pre-announced a utility for doing just what you want. No idea how well it's going to work, but it - hopefully - wouldn't go to market unless it worked well.
posted by glyphlet at 2:11 PM on October 12, 2005

I've imported Quark 4 docs (multi-page magazine layouts) very easily, with only text flow/runaround checking/tweaking needed. I've found it's much much faster if you "lose" all images first.
posted by amberglow at 2:53 PM on October 12, 2005

I'm an art director at a small trade magazine, and I converted some of our older issues from quark 4.1 from the previous designer before we converted to ID CS1. It was almost more trouble than it was worth, it took on an average 3-4 hours to do a 52 page issue. There were always lots of little issues I had to go in by hand an fix up. Some pictures seemed to resize, there were some odd font issues, alignment issues and grouping issues. Some of these problems may have been due to the files coming from another computer, but it was a lot of work.
posted by Mcable at 4:00 PM on October 12, 2005

One thing that you have to do in InDesign before you open the Quark doc is set it to use the Single-line Paragraph Composer. That'll keep the line breaks of your text as close to the Quark file as possible.

You should also keep in mind that Quark probably didn't make this an easy process for Adobe and you'll get perfect results when converting large or complex docs. Quark most likely didn't hand over the specs for the XPress file format to their biggest competitor and say "have at it." It just seems unlikely to me.

I would strongly recommend reading the tech doc here. It is largely accurate about what will convert correctly.
posted by glyphlet at 7:32 PM on October 12, 2005