Here was a forum question over on the very popular InDesignTalk forum; which I get an email digest for. This had to do with how to convert page elements and paragraph styles from within Quark documents into InDesign Adobe files and of course applying those styles when you convert to Adobe files:

“In the past year or two I converted many files from Quark to InDesign for our education unit. I am now needing to make some changes to the files and my boss blithely pointed out that the original author was a faithful user of style sheets in Quark. I am a faithful user of styles in InDesign, but I must admit I paid no attention to them when I did the conversion. Now when I look at the files I see lots of styles in the InDesign panels, but none of them seem to be applied to any text. Am I correct about that? Did I miss a huge (and in retrospect ghastly) part of the conversion process?

Thanks as always for sharing your vast experience….
(and)

I must amend some of my description…looking at a bit more of the file, I find that some paragraph styles are applied to text, but most with local overrides. Perhaps the much admired originator of the files was not as pristine as expected. But I would like a short explanation of what to expect from the Q to ID conversion process with respect para and char styles.”
Source: http://www.listsearch.com/InDesign/Thread/index.lasso?18952#144469

Without much gibbering from me, here was an excellent reply to her question:

“Good news: it isn’t the fault of the conversion process.
Bad news: People with perfectly good styles don’t apply them perfectly.

Converting from QXP to InDesign (whether via direct conversion of a QXP 4.11
file or through the fine Q2ID plug-in) faithfully translates style sheets,
swatches, and master pages. However lousy a job the original designer did
with those building blocks is also faithfully translated.

In other words, if you opened up the original Quark file in
QuarkXPress, you’d see the same mess.

Hope that cheers you up! ”

–Claudia

claudia@practicalia.net
Author of Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications
(Peachpit Press, 2009)
Source: InDesignTalk

And on a separate thread on that same forum, where one was wondering whether 199 was a good enough price for an adobe file converter like Q2ID (Quark to InDesign), an award winning Adobe Creative Suite InDesign Plug-in to convert QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign, this was replied, by Bob Levine:

IME, Q2ID does a better job, but I should add that I haven’t seen a Quark 4
file in quite some time so there’s really no way to test it.

And I’ll say it again…Q2ID is the bet $199 you could possibly spend if you
have to work with Quark files.

Bob
Source: http://www.listsearch.com/InDesign/Thread/index.lasso?18956#144498

Have great day.

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