“Content is free. Formats are not” is the article’s title from cnet. Now, this strays away from purely printing, although content in the digital printing world and certainly the publishing sector faces a similar fate:

“Content may be free, but the format in which we buy it certainly is not. As Apple, Google, Red Hat, and others increasingly demonstrate, consumers and enterprises are happy to pay for “free” when packaged in convenient formats that add value to digital goods.
….
All of these (re)purchases strike me that the media world may have problems, but they are mostly of discovering convenient formats in which to deliver content. Formats that suggest, and sometimes demand, payment.”
….
Good content is a necessary precondition to getting paid, but it’s not going to be reason we pay anymore. That reason for payment is the format in which the content is delivered.
Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the physicality of the delivery mechanisms confused us: we were buying the paper but thought we were buying the news.”
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10369471-16.html

Adobe, Quark, Microsoft, Corel and others all have their various proprietary file formats. Some, like PDF, may be more open than others, like a heavily encrypted QuarkXPress or QXP file. Whether your goal is to make a new print file or to share your textual content on the internet via a blog or web page the problem is the same. You need and generally want to free your content…

This is where I remind you of Markzware’s 10+ year running data conversion software for desktop publishing software, such as Q2ID (Quark to InDesign), PUD2ID (Microsoft Publisher to Adobe InDesign), ID2Q (InDesign to QuarkXPress) and the new, rather interesting kid on the block, PageZephyr – a content index, search, editing and extraction application for Quark and InDesign file formats (and more to come soon).

If Content is king, than “content conversion is the prince” and worth it’s weight in gold, which has been rising nicely in price at that… Check PageZephyr out and let us know what you think. Have a great weekend.

Tags: Adobe, Adobe InDesign, content conversion, content conversion is the prince, content extraction, content index, Content is free. Formats are not, Content is king, content on the internet, Content Search, Corel, data conversion, Desktop Publishing, desktop publishing layouts, Desktop Publishing Software, digital printing, encrypted QuarkXPress, ID2Q, InDesign to QuarkXPress, kindle, Microsoft, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Publisher to Adobe InDesign, PageZepher, PageZephyr, preflight InDesign, print-file, Printing, printing world, proprietary file formats, pub2id, publishing, publishing sector, Q2ID, Q2IN, Quark and InDesign, quark to indesign, QuarkXPress, text extraction, textual content

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 3:47 am and is filed under Content Search, Desktop Search, ID2Q (Adobe InDesign To QuarkXPress), Markzware Conversion Tools, PageZephyr, Print and Publishing News, Pub2ID (Publisher to Adobe InDesign), Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign), search extract. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.