Quark to InDesign conversion?

Does anyone have any experience of Quark to InDesign convertor. I am not sure if there is is just the one, or more than one, such utility.
I would appreciate any feedback on which is the best product to go for; and whether it is worth the money.

If you don't want to buy the conversion software, there is a prompt service that will do it.
Here QuarkXpress files can be converted into Indesign files for a small fee, which will save you purchasing the whole conversion software for only a single file or so: link deleted by forum host

Similar Messages

Need to import a Medical Dictionary from Quark to InDesign

Just switched from Quark to InDesign for a Medical Journal and they need their dictionary to be loaded into InDesign.
I have their .QUD file from Quark but am having difficulty loading it through the preferences.
Any help would be great.
Thanks in advance!

From your description I'm guessing a .qud is a Quark User Dictionary file from Windows XPress. If so, then it should be a simple text file.<br /><br />The best thing to do is open it in a text editor, make sure it all looks clean, and then paste all of the text into InDesign and run a spell check, keeping all of the words as you go. A bunch of clicks for the conversion, but it will create a user dictionary file as InDesign requires, which is a different format from Quark's.<br /><br />When done back up your new file from ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Linguistics/Dictionaries/Adobe Custom Dictionary/<language of the file>. (Mac location, Windows should be similar.)

Please share your experiences moving from Quark to InDesign

My company's design group is pushing to move from Quark to Indesign, starting with one of my projects, which is our largest (400 pages), highest profile document (it is currently in Quark, and the plan is to pour the text and graphics into InDesign). Our schedule is very lean--leaving little room for surprises. None of the compositors in the design group have used InDesign. They are expected to recieve some formal training--but only about 1 week's worth total over a period of several weeks. I am all for making the transition to InDesign, but feel that the wiser path to take is to start on smaller and less high-profile documents that have more time in the schedule for the learning curve. However the design manager is adament that the transition will be problem-free. My experience is that any transition like this has bumps, and most are unexpected, and create havoc and panic. This document has only gone to print on time once (in 10+ years)--with me managing the project and with much sweat and tears. My hope that this year we could go to print on time AND do it with less wear and tear on all who work on it. I just don't think this will happen making this tranisiton now. Can anyone share their experiences when they made the transition?

Everyone else has had really good advice about starting with a 400 page doc, particularly if it's complex. If it's just text with a couple illustrations every 4 or 5 pages, it might be do-able, but if it's a complex document with lots of stuff on every page, it could be tricky.
Try this link for the official converter's guide.
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/indesign/articles/indcs3ip_quarkmigration.pdf
Some practical tips for the beginning XPress converter that I learned the hard way...
- Cmd-shift-click pulls stuff off the master page.
- The lack of master anchors may limit your ability to accomplish certain master page layouts (with prelinked text boxes) that are easy to do in XPress. Everyone here will tell you to simply use the margins to control your text flow, which may or may not work well for your particular case.
- Always scroll around a document by holding down option+spacebar. This insures that you will get the scroll hand tool every time instead of accidentally inserting a zillion spaces into your text.
-Cmd-shift-A deselects everything in a text box so that you can select another tool. There is no next/prev tool shortcut, but rather keys for each tool. (T is text, A is the white arrow, V is the black arrow)
- You "thread frames" rather than "link text boxes" despite how I wrote this. :)
- Don't set text wrap to effect only the stuff underneath in the prefs because...
- All text should go in a separate layer on top of the graphics layer because...
- InDesign dynamically resolves transparency effects at print time, which means if part of your text is layered under a transparent element it may get rasterized.
- If you need to get text to show even when it's on top of an object with a text wrap, select the text box and check the "Ignore text wrap" option.
- Overprint Preview is your friend. It'll help show you all those things that you didn't notice were going to print strangely before you commit them to print. (Overprinting white type, etc)
- When you're just starting out, so is the Flattener Preview because you will start to get a feel for what is going to be bitmapped and what won't.
- XPress documents imported into InDesign should always be exported as Adobe InDesign Interchange and reimported one more time. .inx is the equivalent of the "thumb-nail drag" trick in XPress to clean up a document that is acting funny.
- XPress documents with placed EPS files may come in with the "Non-printing object" attribute checked on some of the EPS graphics. There's a script floating around that Dave Saunders wrote to fix this. Also, turning Overprint Preview will help you spot this (look for the disappearing objects).
- If you are placing EPS objects, be sure to set your import options to "Render preview from postscript" or your previews won't look right and/or may be deceiving.
- Don't every base your paragraph styles off of "Basic Paragraph Style", because if it ever changes in another document your type will suddenly change when you paste it from one document to another.
- Don't base anything off of "Basic Object Style" for the same reasons.
- Your defaults change whenever your change the options in a palette/panel without anything selected. Curious why every new object you draw comes in with a drop shadow or a 3pt rule, for example? You accidentally set those options with nothing selected.
- InDesign's paragraph composer may drive you (or your proof-readers) wonky because it will change the flow of text paragraph-wide if you redo a line of text. You can either adjust it for decent text flow and leave it alone OR turn it off by basing all your stylesheets on single-line composer. People in here will largely recommend option one, but if it doesn't work for your stuff, don't be afraid to disable it.
- Make sure to upgrade to the latest CS3 update, because CS3 v5.00 had some fairly crashy behavior.
- If CS3 feels really sluggish, try turning off page previews in the Pages palette.
- CS3 and OS X 10.5 are not fully compatible yet.
Best of luck! It's not really that big a change, but everything is slightly different so expect a bit of time to really get your feet under you.

Importing Quark into Indesign cs3

I am importing a quark 4.1 file into indesign cs3 and it seems all the text frames I had tabs formated on didn't translate into indesign cs3 well. Specifically the last couple tabs were off making the text jump to the next line and moving other text over. Is there anything I could do to fix this isssue? I tried to export the text from quark to a word doc and then I tried to import that word doc into indesign and it still was messed up. Any suggestions?

My guess is that the tab settings are exactly the same as you had them
in Quark, but that the text is wrapping a little differently. Figure out
what's making the text a little bit longer in Indesign and fix that.
Conversions from Quark, or Pagemaker, or even from previous versions of
Indesign always involve some fixing up. For me, it's not worth
converting from Quark unless the document is being completely reworked.
Otherwise, I just leave it in Quark.
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com

Markzware's Quark-to-InDesign Plugin

I saw someone mention the Markzware plugin on here a while back. Glad I saw that post! We just got new computers at work, and no one could find the QuarkXpress installation CDs to install it on my new computer. I don't design in Quark any more, but I often need to access old files that were created in it. So I asked for that plugin (work was happy to buy it for me since they didn't want to shell out the money for the software again, whereas I didn't want to be stuck with no way to access old files). Just curious if anyone has used it regularly and could comment on it (?). I experimented with converting a 68-page magazine in it yesterday. Took 5 minutes or so but appears to be a good conversion. Just wondering what sort of thing I should look out for.
The only confusion after installing it was that it doesn't really show up in an obvious manner in InDesign. Quark files aren't listed as open-able (except the really early versions which InDesign could already open). But if I go to open a file and then say "show all files," I can pick a Quark 7 file and it works.
Anyone use it much?
Thanks, Phyllis

The first thing to do after the conversion is export to INX and open
that to work on.
Text frames will likely have a slight offset, EPS files may be set to
non-printing. Text will likely reflow.
But generally speaking, the conversions are very good.
Bob

Quark to InDesign CS5

Hi!
I have a product catalogue with almost 600 pages, that i want to convert to InDesign CS5.
Whats the best tool for this job?
Can you recommend any plug-ins that I will benefit from? Like automatic indexing, ect.
Frome this catalogue (A4), i create separate one-product-pdf's in letter format.
Is there any automatic way to do this?
I will start converting soon, and hope that you guys have some tips for me!
Best regards
Anders

ID can open Quark 4 files directly. Any later version will require the Q2ID plugin from Markzware. Conversions of documents will anywhere from near perfect to useless, depending on how they were built to begin with. They will ALWAYS need careful examination and cleanup.
THere are a couple of (pricey) commercial plugins for building catalogs from a database. I don't know if they would help your workflow or not. Indexing is built into ID, but if the markers are not there already, there are some scripts that make life simpler. I've used IndexBrutal (http://marcautret.free.fr/geek/indd/indexbrut/) with success, and nearly anything is scriptable if you can define the problem in logical terms.
ID can, of course, alter the document size (and move and resize page elements using Layout Adjustment), but that may not be what you have in mind. Yo cannot scale during export to PDF, but you can place one ID file (or PDF) into another, and scale that while it is being placed. See InDesignSecrets » Blog Archive » Zanelli Releases MultiPageImporter for Importing both PDF and INDD Files for a great script to do this.
For getting single pages, Scott zanelli also wrote an exporting script (http://indesignsecrets.com/page-exporter-utility-peu-5-script-updated-for-cs3.php) which appears not to have been updated recently, which probably means it still runs in CS5, or could be made to fairly easily. You could also export a multipage PDF and break it into individual pages in Acrobat.

Placed PDF made in Quark bug, InDesign CS4 XP

Hi,
I've just been bitten by the bug that causes characters to drop out when you create a PDF from an InDesign CS4 document that has a placed PDF made in Quark.
Has it been resolved? I looked at the update notes to 6.0.2 and 6.0.3 and couldn't see anything about it.
This is fairly urgent for me. If it hasn't been resolved, are there any workarounds?
Thank you,
Ariel

You may be right... but it didn't seem relevant at the time, since I rarely receive Quark files, so I probably phased out.
Anyway, the 6.0.2 for InDesign CS4ME does not fix the issue. I thought it might. And what a story it was to upgrade (which I just did this evening). Apparently, the 6.0.2 upgrade only works for a later build of IDCS4 (something like 6.0.0.421). I had the earlier build (something like 6.0.0.270). And the only solution was to completely uninstall InDesign, download the latest Demo on the Winsoft site (800MB. Took me around 2 hours). Install that. Then download the update and install that as well.
And it didn't even fix the issue!
The only positive side is that all my preferences survived the trauma intact!
Ariel

FrameMaker to InDesign conversion?

I have FrameMaker 7.2 and InDesign CS3. I have a few book projects in FrameMaker that I would like to convert over to CS3. However, one of them has extensive (hundreds) of cross-references (footnotes, basically), and the other has been indexed. I don't mind losing formatting, since I figure I'll be creating a new format in InDesign anyway, but I do mind losing the cross-references and the indexing.
Is there a way to import my FrameMaker files into InDesign that will retain cross-references and indexing?
What I've tried:
I tried saving a test FrameMaker file as RTF, text, and MIF, but InDesign didn't recognize any of these formats. (Though text and RTF would lose my indexing and cross-references, I was trying to see if InDesign would recognize ANY format.)
I found a service online that charges rather steeply for converting from FrameMaker to InDesign, but that isn't an option.
Thanks in advance for any help that is offered.
regards,
Marina

semiwool wrote:
But that tool didn't work with our test files. At the request of the DTP Tools folks, I ftp'd two of our archives. They acknowledged receiving them, but I haven't heard anything since. I'm guessing that these files are too complex for their filter. I should explain that these files began life as design-y Quark files, which were later converted to FrameMaker. So there are a lot of design elements you might not often find in FrameMaker documents.
InDesign table styles and table cell styles are very smart and offer more formatting options than FrameMaker, but InDesign doesn't sort tables, and doesn't have the FrameMaker column-width settings like "make current column same width as column x," or "make selected column(s) as wide as its longest text line."
Here's where I get really confused: ID tables.
In FrameMaker, the Table Tag contains the information about rules. But when I build rule information into an ID Table Style, nothing happens. I get no rules at all unless I ALSO specify rules in the Cell Style. What am I missing here?
Also, this business of associating cell styles and paragraph styles seems like an unnecessary pain to me. What am I missing here?
Also, ID doesn't make a distinction between the title block and heading rows, which is a problem for us because each of these elements is formatted differently in our tables.
Also, ID doesn't have the "table continuation" variable.
Whew! 8-)
There's an InDesign table-sorting script (search Google) somewhere around, but I don't think anyone's yet created scripts for these other features.
As always, submit format feature requests at https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform. The more requests they receive, the better chance it will happen sometime in a future release.
HTH
Regards,
Peter
The DTP Tools' MIF Filter for InDesign commercial plug-in converts conditional text and cross-references.
It's not surprising that non-standard FrameMaker methods and techniques don't convert well with a tool designed for standard FrameMaker, so the workarounds to wrangle Quark originals into FrameMaker may be helpful to the DTP Tools folks to work with going forward. It's always OK to drop a note to follow-up on their progress with your files.
Yes, InDesign turns certain table properties over to cells. Not necessarily better or worse than FrameMaker, just different. One example is that FrameMaker's paragraph format Table Cell margin property is a Table Cell offset property in InDesign. That's consistent with InDesign's text frame offset property; FrameMaker has no text offset property within a text frame that corresponds to this InDesign property.
FrameMaker table formats save the paragraph formats in the first row of table cells. When you create a new FM table with a given format, the last-created table's number of header and body rows, and table columns, are the initial suggestions; the first row of cells has the saved paragraph formats, and so do the additional rows.
True, InDesign tables have no title element. Using the paragraph in which you create the table for the title text probably will do the same thing as your FrameMaker table titles. Search Google for "indesign table continuation variable" without quotes for tips on emulating them.
You'll get used to the fact that these two products are different. One major difference you'll probably see going forward, is that the familar basic FrameMaker tool set that you've grown used to, isn't going to change markedly, even as its user interface, interactive-media options, outputs and frameworks like XML, DITA, etc, do change; compare this to InDesign's steady growth in technical-publishing features, release-by-release. The more you make use of the feature request form, the more likely you'll see some of your requests come to a future release.
HTH
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

PDF to InDesign Conversion?

Has anyone had success converting PDF files to InDesign? tested PDF2ID but formatting gets lost..

Formatting, or styles?
PDF is a final output file format and doesn't retain style information, but the formatting applied to the type should remain. Since there is no style information in the PDF, all the text should, I think, be styled with no paragraph style or possibly [Basic Paragraph] and have local formatting overrides applied after conversion. That's the best you can hope for with what's currently available.

Quark to InDesign CS3 Question

I have a Quark 6.5 file for Mac and need to be able to open in InDesign CS3 (PC). I do not have the plug-in and have no need to purchase it as this is the only file I have. Would it work to save the Quark file down to version 4 and then open in InDesign that way?
Any suggestions?
Thanks!

Yes it would, except that Quark 6 will save down only to Quark 5. So you
would need to then open it in Quark 5 and save down to Quark 4.
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com

InDesign conversion

I have a large quanity of InDesign cs3 files. I have a new dual core MAC with InDesign 6cs. I need to convert. Can not fine InDesign 4 ... what is available?

To speed up the conversion process, you can use my "Resave files script" — version 1.
P.S.
Following Peter’s advice I just wrote a script which batch-converts inx and idml files to InDesign documents.
You can batch-export to inx or idml format with these scripts.

Converting Quark to InDesign

reference InDesign 10.5.6:
I have some old Quark files in 4.01 that I need to access, can I save them as editable pdfs and if so, further open these editable pdfs in InDesign? Or, is there some other way to convert these files without having to recreate from scratch?

> have some old Quark files in 4.01 that I need to access
InDesign can open Quark 4.01 files.
There will be some text reflow, but they do open.

Problem after converting Quark to indesign

Hi Forum,
this is related question to my previous one.
After Quark is converted to indesign, I have problems on special characters converted to Outlines and overprint applied.
I tried to remove it many ways (as i have requested in my earlier post, for contentType.unassigned)...
How to solve this out.

> have some old Quark files in 4.01 that I need to access
InDesign can open Quark 4.01 files.
There will be some text reflow, but they do open.

Convert quark to Indesign

How to convert quark file to Indesign

Hi publisher,
You can choose File > Open, select the file wants to be opened in InDesign to open documents and templates created with QuarkXPress or QuarkXPress. There are some recent verions of Quark that are not supported by InDesign. So if your file is created in earlier versions of quark, it may seem working in InDesign when opening, else recent versions are not supported.
~Monica Singh

Quark to InDesign, again

I see discussions on opening Quark files with InDesign, but they all seem to involve older versions of both applications. I have Quark 6.5 files I want to open in InDesign CS4. Namely about 80 business cards. Any good way to do that yet? I need to get them to native InDesign format.
Thanks

Bob,
I've been thinking for a while about this and what you have said before about going to Windows 7 boxes...
I have been using Macs for my personal computing for over 16 years now and have been very happy. I went to Apple when my personally, custom built Windows box was more problems than it was worth. But times change...
...and my 5 year old Mac Mini needs replacement. Since using a Windows box at work and running XP SP2 for Quark 6.5 first, and then CS4, for over 2 years now I haven't had any troubles except one big Quark crash and restore. It looks like Windows finally caught up to the Mac, stability wise (not saying Macs are perfect, but they have been very close for my money). Or our IT person keeps things very smooth.
I know you advocate custom, matched components for a Windows box (which I use to do). Just point me in the right direction. I need some place where I can get a easy guide (or any other resource) on how to do it like you would find in www.xceler8yourmac.com. I would also need an overview of what I would be looking at expense and time wise. An inventory, I'd guess.
I may just switch if it can squeeze it inside my budget, such as it is.

Quark to InDesign conversion?

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