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.

Ok everybody I have got an interesting one here. First of all please excuse my messy desktop, a lot of things going on, things downloading other bad files excreta. But I’ve got this bad supposed InDesign file but there is more to this story, it does not appear to be a InDesign file ever though it say’s .indd and gives us the appearance of a InDesign file CS3 is picking that up from my system here which I have primarily running on this machine.

However you will see if I drop it on our advanced preflight application, FlightCheck and I’ll drop it on our FlightCheck Professional 6.5 beta which will be out soon (Is shipping now!) with CS4 with Quark 8 support. You will see right away besides a couple of preflight errors and different things alone those lines is that it is showing us that it is a Quark file. QuarkXPress file version 5 , the customer did say it is quiet a old file and it’s causing him problems and see if we can help. So someone along the line decided to just name it .INDD and see if that would just turn it magically into a InDesign file and obviously it did not, you can see here clearly what’s going on with this file. Right so basically you get a preview with the images, which is a nice feature in FlightCheck.

In any event FlightCheck claims it is a Quark file, customer claims InDesign file so lets just go in there and see if it is as easy as this. It will warn us if you will want to change the file extensions, it will say use .qxp . Now you see it has changed into a Quark file here so lets now see what happens there. This file opens in Quark without a problem. Ok now if we save as Quark and now switch over too InDesign and use Q2ID to convert Quark files into InDesign we can now find that file that the customer thought was InDesign was actually Quark and now we can actually convert that Quark file into InDesign with Markzware FlightCheck, sorry FlightCheck is for checking, Q2ID, ID2Q excreta are for converting and there we have it.

It is converted and that’s a wrap. Another happy customer, another interesting case, I just wanted to share it with you. We can fix your bad InDesign files, just send them over to sales or just send an email to sales @markzware.com and we will tell you where to send your files. We can preflight your files with FlightCheck. You see how handy FlightCheck was there just to give you a quick overview on what that file is, the customer did not know, I knew because FlightCheck told me, it was simple as dragging and dropping and we have our conversion tools Q2ID, Quark to InDesign, ID2Q, InDesign to Quark and of course Pub2ID, Microsoft Publisher to InDesign. All right, David signing off, have a great day and hope this helped you.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 2:16 am and is filed under Markzware Conversion Tools, Markzware News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.