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.

Adobe InDesign cannot open the file...

“Cannot open the file “*****.INDD”. Adobe InDesign may not support the file format, a plug-in that supports the file format may be missing, or the file may be open in another application.”

Good news- Solution below!

That was the message a customers file was giving us. They thought their Adobe file is corrupt; and it might still be. But what does this rather broad Adobe InDesign dialog message mean?

From a few Google searches, I see, oddly enough, that many will get this Adobe InDesign error message when trying to open a version of QuarkXPress higher than v4.11; which Adobe cannot handle. (Markzware Q2ID can of course convert all versions of QuarkXPress right into Adobe InDesign.)

Yet this message also seems to come up at other un-appropriate times; like the file is really damaged. For instance in this thread, titled, “Indd file created in France will not open in the US” we see the same exact Adobe error message as above… So what is going on?

SOLUTION FOUND!
Then the solution appeared; which I figured as much, for the file is not recognized even by FlightCheck. We find the answers here in this useful thread:  Read more... (314 words, 1 image, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)