Scott O. wrote:
How can I get text out of old QuarkXPress files? Thanks for your time.
I sometimes sit on the back porch and wonder how many QuarkXPress files there are in the world. What about other worlds? The answer is not 42. But however many there may be, you can be sure that someone, somewhere, is someday going to try to get those files into InDesign.
The good news is that InDesign will — all by itself — open QuarkXPress 3.x and 4.0 files. It won’t always do it perfectly, but it does a reasonably good job of it. For best results, I strongly recommend:
- Open the XPress file in XPress 3 or 4.
- Make sure all the linked images are OK.
- Make sure you have the fonts installed.
- Use File>Save As to save a nice clean version of the XPress file.
Then you should be able to open it in InDesign by using File>Open (or just drag the XPress file over the InDesign application icon). In my experience, InDesign CS2 does a better job of opening QX files than CS, but some things still may change. For example, it’s pretty rare that you won’t get some text reflow — after all, the two programs use radically different text composition engines, so it’s hard to imagine how InDesign could retain XPress’s text flow.
Here are five other things you should know about getting content out of XPress files. First, if you open an XPress file, you might consider using File>Export to create an InDesign Interchange Format (INX) file. Then open that INX file in InDesign. This cleans out any weirdness that might have snuck in during the conversion. (Perhaps that’s just superstition, but that’s what I do.)
Second, remember that sometimes it’s easier to just export your text stories out of QuarkXPress as Word documents and place those files into a new InDesign template.
Third, if you have an XPress 5 or 6 document, you can save it down to a QX4 document and then open it in InDesign. Or, you can use the Q2ID plug-in to open it. Q2ID can open XPress documents from version 3 to 6, and in some cases does it better than InDesign does it itself.
Fourth, if you’re tempted to try to export XML out of XPress and then somehow get it into InDesign, please call a doctor and get some medication to make that desire go away. Unless you’re a masochist, in which case feel free to roll in the pleasures of a painful month of attempts.
Finally, if you’re just trying to get raw text out of an XPress document, note that you can often just open the file in a text editor (such as Notepad or TextWrangler). You’ll see a huge amount of garbage, but if you scroll down you may find just what you’re looking for.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on June 20, 2006
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