by Claudia McCue
April 2008

If like many designers you are in the process of making the big switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign, you know it is not a trivial undertaking. You have to retrain your brain to a new way of working and remind your fingers which keys to hit for those newfangled shortcuts. You are in a hurry to get up to speed, and you have just been asked to create a client’s next newsletter in InDesign. The template for the newsletter is currently in QuarkXPress. You’ve finally come to that fork in the road: Do you build a new newsletter template from scratch, or do you take the easy way out and just open the file with InDesign? If there’s a lot of work in the template, go for File > Open. While it’s surprising this works at all, you should know what converts and what does not.

OPENING QUARKXPRESS FILES IN INDESIGN
Since the beginning, InDesign has had the ability to open QuarkXPress files created in versions 3.32 through 4.11—that hasn’t changed since InDesign One-Oh. What has changed, of course, is QuarkXPress itself; after all, we’re up to version 7.0 now. Yet InDesign CS3 still cannot open up documents created in QuarkXPress versions later than 4.11. Why is that? At the release of QuarkXPress 5.0, the file architecture of QuarkXPress documents changed—one imagines, to thwart opening by wily InDesign users.  Read more... (2018 words, 3 images, estimated 8:04 mins reading time)