Markzware is know for it’s invention of preflighting and of course the stand-alone application FlightCheck Professional. Markzware is also very popular for our easy-to-use desktop publishing conversion Plugins, XTensions and applications. Here is a small overview:

Q2ID – QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign – 199 – Macintosh/Windows
A great Plug-in for any Adobe InDesign user. With one click, open your QuarkXPress documents right within Adobe InDesign; the complete layout, ready to edit and use! Adobe CS4 Plugin or CS3.

ID2Q - InDesign to Quark XTension – 199 – Macintosh/Windows
A great tool for any QuarkXPress users, as there is a growing number of InDesign files. With one click, open your InDesign documents right within Quark; the complete layout, ready to edit and use!

PUB2ID – Microsoft Publisher to Adobe InDesign – 199  – Macintosh/Windows
A CS3 or CS4 plugin which makes getting MSPub files into InDesign simple as can be!

MarkzTools 8 – Recovers bad Quark files – 199 – Macintosh
An XTension QuarkXPress 8 (Quark 7 version also available.) which can keep your files in good order, allow you to down-save to a lower version and can most amazingly fix or recover bad or corrupted Quark files, most of the time!  Read more... (347 words, 1 image, estimated 1:23 mins reading time)

I love analogies and here is one that was a perfect fit for FlightCheck Professional or preflighting in the generic:

RT @OphieLuStudios @aj_mitchell: Oops…New highway ramp too steep. To be torn down and rebuilt at Design firm’s expense. http://bit.ly/8kstZd

Construction or laying out roads is no different than designing a new newspaper or yearbook layout in Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress or Microsoft Publisher. Yes, perhaps the costs and processes are different, but I would guess the percentage in terms of money is similar. Re-working costs time and money. First preflight than PDF. The original article says:

“The brand-new never-opened Fairfax Road offramp of westbound Highway 178 must be demolished and rebuilt because of a design flaw, the Bakersfield public works department confirmed Monday.”
Source: http://www.kget.com/news/local/story/New-Hwy-178-ramp-is-huge-safety-issue-1-million/

“Design flaw.” Graphic designers have had it pretty good with printers really. Did you notice in the article that the “design firm” had to pay the nearly 1 million dollar fee to re-do it all? A good prepress department is worth it’s weight in gold really. (And gold is expensive these days!)

What is your favorite preflight analogy?  Read more... (209 words, 2 images, estimated 50 secs reading time)

Every once in a while, we hear people looking for, Adobe Publisher! Now we know they really mean Microsoft Publisher or wait, did they mean Adobe InDesign? Nine times out of ten though it is someone who needs Publisher to InDesign conversion to get an indd file and are looking for the InDesign Plugin, PUB2ID (Mac or Win; $199) from Markzware.

Since this just happened today and it’s Friday, I thought it as good as any time to share this little tidbit of page layout information. You can try an InDesign demo by clicking here and a Microsoft Publisher demo by clicking here. No matter which you end up using, an InDesign file extension or MSPUB, we are here to help you free your content!

Markzware launched, at PRINT 09 in September, a new content search engine technology called PageZephyr. This beta Macintosh application will index desktop publishing file formats such as Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and soon other document types, like PDF, Microsoft Publisher and even “the rage” of it’s day, PageMaker. Here we see some of the excitement generated from the show-floor and one simple exclusive press release, which Mary Gay (Public Relations) pushed up court… and re-tweets via Twitter! Watch Patrick Marchese, co-founder and CEO of Markzware, demonstrate PageZephyr…

It is amazing how fast information can travel in this day and age; which is one of the said purposes of PageZepyr; to bridge the printed world with the Internet or online world.

TRANSCRIPT:

All right, so “Content Search Engine“, so Mary Gay, tell us…. Hey everybody, were here at Print 09 in Chicago. It has been a pretty interesting show here, because we have announced a new product that, which is completely different from our “normal joe” that we’ve been showing here at the shows with preflighting. Were going into a whole new direction, which is ‘exciting’! Because were looking into the future with, well, here it is- Content Search Engine.  Read more... (925 words, estimated 3:42 mins reading time)

“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  Read more... (348 words, estimated 1:24 mins reading time)

It is nearly impossible to make a truly standard, yet open (i.e., allowing many and any customers in) design-to-print workflow; but their are standard tools, tips and tactics to make things flow properly. Here was a great post on the PrintPlanet forum asking for preflight, prepress and general workflow help. It reads:

Basic Workflow Standardization
“I am a print shop manager in an in-plant. One of my biggest problems is fonts. Most of the documents I get are from Word or uneducated Publisher users. Some other problems are users creating a two-color jobs in CMYK and black text not being pure black. Currently we handle everything we get on an individual basis, but it is getting completely out of hand. I need to start putting in place some systems to handle some of these problems

Is there a easy way to convert documents to pdf with the correct specifications before I get them? For example is there a pdf print driver that I can put on my web site or push out to everyone on my network that it will create a pdf to my specifications so I do not have to worry about fonts or poor resolution? If so how much does something like that cost?  Read more... (373 words, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)

We are working hard on new features and functions for our preflight and conversion software and as such, are always glad to share other customer experiences, including with QXP, Adobe InDesign CS3 and Adobe InDesign CS4 (preflight a file without InDesign missing quality control checkpoints). You can also convert QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign and move content with the Q2ID plug in in InDesign.  Markzware has a nice growing list of video testimonials and also a page with customer quotes. We have taken some of the more interesting ones and highlighted them in this video:

Hi, I’m Khristyl Clerigo and I’m going to show you some of the most interesting Markzware product testimonials.

Let us hear what Shellie L. Hall of Ducktype Digital and Get Creative News has to say about FlightCheck Professional.

As a prepress professional I have spend many hours going through customers’ digital files one by one, checking for everything from fonts, to page size and image resolution to make sure the files would print correctly on press.  Read more... (671 words, estimated 2:41 mins reading time)

By Vanessa Voltolina and Jason Fell

Publishers using InDesign to produce photo-heavy magazines now have two plug-in options that aim to enhance the photo identification and style conversion processes.

PUB2ID (Markzware’s Publisher document converter) translates the details of the content within a Publisher document and re-creates it within InDesign, converting page size, positioning, fonts and styles, text attributes, layers, and linked text boxes, as well as automatically extracts images embedded in the Publisher file.

Magazine publishing clients include the National Publishers Group and Rockwall, Texas-based Living magazine. According to AlphaGraphics lead graphic designer Bruce Harris, using the updated plug-in saves him between 15 minutes to an hour. “I especially like how it exports the images to a separate folder automatically.”

Read more

Markzware Announces The Release of PUB2ID V2 For Adobe InDesign CS3 and CS4
Publisher To InDesign Now Runs With Adobe CS4

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA ANA, California, March 11, 2009 — Markzware (http://www.markzware.com), the leading developer of data extraction and conversion software and inventor of preflighting, released an upgrade to its highly recommended conversion tool PUB2ID for Adobe CS3 upgrade CS4. PUB2ID v2 (Microsoft Publisher to Adobe InDesign) is a plug-in that enables users to convert native-application Microsoft Publisher files (MS Publisher versions 2002 through 2007) to Adobe InDesign while preserving the content, as well as the styles and formatting. PUB2ID can be used with an Adobe InDesign 3 file (or Adobe InDesign 3 files) or with an Adobe InDesign 4 file (or Adobe InDesign 4 files).

“Markzware’s mission is to make it easier for the creators and printers to work with the applications they are comfortable with so users can seamlessly integrate these valuable products into their existing workflow,” said Mary Gay Marchese, public relations of Markzware.

The Adobe InDesign user simply clicks on “File” in the toolbar, then “Open,” and selects the Microsoft Publisher file for conversion. This simple two-step process initiates the conversion and opens the document in Adobe InDesign, saving graphic artists, prepress and printing professionals countless hours that would otherwise be spent recreating the document from the ground up.  Read more... (623 words, estimated 2:30 mins reading time)

Here is a video demonstration of Markzware’s PUB2ID or Microsoft Publisher (MSPub) to Adobe InDesign conversion filter:

There is no demo for this popular conversion plugin, so this video is very useful. If you still are not sure, you can submit a test file for conversion by the Markzware technical support staff. There is also this video testimonial from a PUB2ID user (”worth every dime!”) and more (They were amazed!)!

Nothing worse than getting in a file type you prefer not to work with-
Have a great day.