Wow — it has been over 15 years since I worked as a print production manager for a large advertising agency in California. Computer-To-Plate (CTP) was starting to garner industry buzz, and in my role, I had to best determine how to take digital creative files, produce them internally and ensure that once they were sent off to the printer or a publication, for example, they would work — meaning, they would render on press the way we expected them to and our clients, the advertisers, were pleased with the results.

Seemed like a simple enough challenge at the time, but what I soon discovered was that it was anything but.

It wasn’t as though the process was any more difficult than it was back in the “days of film.” At the agency, we had art directors who were mocking up layouts on boards that were turned over to me for recreation in QuarkXPress. After working with the art directors and others within the agency to make final tweaks to the ads, I then had to provide them with the assurance that what I was creating digitally would reproduce in the manner they expected, having the best print quality  and would result in quality image printing.  Read more... (1248 words, estimated 4:60 mins reading time)

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)

BY TAMI STODGHILLPRESS RELATIONS, XCHANGE UK You know the story, as many of you are living it – day in and day out. Your client presents you with their document, and it’s up to you to replicate it within the application of their choice — or your choice. It sounds simple, but in reality it’s generally a nightmare of tedious reformatting, and after hours of that, your next client’s project arrives. Often enough to make you reconsider your choice of applications on some days, but before you hang up your mouse, take a minute to look at what might become the most important tools in your design tool chest.

ID2Q (Adobe® InDesign® to QuarkXPress®) is an XTensions module for QuarkXPress® and Q2ID (QuarkXPress to InDesign) is a Plug-in for Adobe InDesign that provides a swift and efficient way to transform one application’s elements into the other application’s elements. That’s right…an entirely new document in a snap! No more reformatting and lost time — the conversion is a simple menu selection.  Read more... (583 words, 22 images, estimated 2:20 mins reading time)