Since ICANN, approved the use of non-Latin characters in domain names today, I thought we would stick on the Internet side with this post. Jörg Oyen, the publishing, Adobe and Quark QPS expert friend of ours over in Germany at Oyen.de, sent me a rather ominous Instant message on Skype the other day, “Do you like balls”? he asked. For some reason, I thought, “oh, must be Google Balls” for it sounds very Googlish (sp?) No, he meant Tagul balls or Tagul meta clouds. Here, you can see Jörg’s meta ball from his site here:

Here is the Markzware meta data cloud (no mystery here):

Beware! This Markzware cloud is not complete and this is limitation of Tagul only getting the first 350 keywords or something to that effect. We see FlightCheck in there, but no Q2ID or ID2Q, our popular Quark-to-InDesign and the other way around as well, conversion tools.

Want to see how we made this? Watch the video here, for good control over your meta data, keywords and general SEO is very important for graphic designers, publishers and printers alike (Yes, print-shops included!):

“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)

In this “making of” the AMERICAN PRINTER TV crew film an interview with Patrick Marchese, Co-founder and CEO of Markzware and a subsequent demonstration of some new, exciting desktop search technology, for indexing and extracting your desktop publishing formats, such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress, from this well know preflight (FlightCheck) and conversion (Quark to InDesign) software developer… more below, but first the video:

Patrick tells us what PageZephyr, the name of this new technology is and briefly what it does. Doug Rosen shows how it works and I stuck in the middle there a small SnapzPro captured demo of some of the key functions of PageZepher. In a nut-shell, it is:

Index, Search, View, Extract and Distribute

QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign Content -

Partial Transcript:

Gonna do a video demonstration for American PrinterTV on the new PageZephyr…. the filming of, the making of… Basically start with your name… are you ready Doug, getting nervous? No more nervous than normal!

OK, whenever your ready (says the camera man to Patrick)…

Hi my name is Pat Marchese with Markzware and I’m here to introduce a brand new product by the name of PageZephyr (PageZepher). What PageZephyr is, is a reader for Quark, InDesign and soon Publisher PageMaker and other document types.  Read more... (638 words, estimated 2:33 mins reading time)

We at Markzware have done countless FlightCheck Professional and Q2ID (Quark to InDesign) or ID2Q (Adobe InDesign to QuarkXpress) live presentations. Generally, like most truly behind their computer software, it is best to give the audience a live taste of how the software behaves in a true workflow setting. Yes, I have had my share of bad software demonstrations, which is why this video is all the more funny for me and perhaps for you as well:

I HAVE DECIDED TO DELETE THIS VIDEO FROM WITHIN THIS POST. IT IS STILL LINKED BELOW, BUT AFTER SEEING THE ENTIRE THING (LESSON LEARNED) IT DAWNED ON ME THAT THIS MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO CHRISTIANS OR THOSE WHOM LOST LOVED ONES TO CANCER. SORRY.

GRRF – The Last Lecture from Lumalin Productions on Vimeo.

Whether you are a graphic designer, print production publisher or printer, this GRFF – The Last Lecture video may have you on the print production floor (For you have seen your share of software demo’s, that is for sure!)

When an InDesign.INDD file is really a Quark .QXP layout…….

Hi, David Dilling here from Markzware and here is yet another interesting one. A customer sent in a email with the dreaded “I have a bad InDesign file please help me!” This one was a little bit different in that he knew it was an old file and that there were defiantly issues with it and he couldn’t quiet figure it out. The subject of this movie is “When InDesign isn’t InDesign but QuarkXPress.” Yes follow me on this one. Come check it out on my screen here because it is quiet a common problem, in any event I’m hearing more and more about this and the type and creator being zapped in the file and other issues like this. It’s very important, the file extension use and how you use it on a Macintosh or even a Windows machine of course as well.

It is not as easy as just adding .INDD to a QuarkXPress file and woof magically it become a InDesign file. Visa versa you just can’t take a Jpeg add a .tiff and it becomes a tiff file, it just does not work that way. If it did life would be a lot simpler but that is just not so. Now come check it out on my screen and thank you for watching.

Does anyone have any experience with Quark to InDesign conversion?

This is the last day, last hours and last minutes of our Q2ID, ID2Q, PUB2ID and Markztools 2 for 1 sale.
Click the link below to get two terrific tools for the price of one and save $199 while you still can.

http://eepurl.com/cMGi

Act now. Offer ends midnight TODAY!

For a limited time, you can get two conversion tools for the price of one. That’s right, two for $199.
Use the links in the promotional flyer link:

http://foxyurl.com/pP4

Act now… Offer expires 7/31

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)  Read more... (476 words, estimated 1:54 mins reading time)