Markzware has released their new version of Q2ID. It now supports both InDesign CS4 and the ability to convert QuarkXPress 8 files. They are providing free upgrades to people that purchased it after Oct 17.
Personally, I really think this is a very useful plug-in. I still have to deal with an old Quark file every now and then, and it is easily worth the money.The plug-in is needed if you want to open Quark 5-8 files. Otherwise if you have a Quark 8 file, you need to Export it out of Quark 8 to Quark 7, then open Quark 7 and export to Quark 6, open it in Quark 6 and export to Quark 5, Open it in Quark 5 and export to Quark 4. Then finally you can open it for free inside InDesign. That is a headache that this plug-in solves.
From my experience with this plug-in I feel that it does about a 95% job. There will be some text re-flow issues and you will want to make sure nothing crazy happened. The more basic the layout, the better your results. One annoyance that you need to look out for is that after a conversion, some of your text will get a yellow highlight. This is because Q2ID turns of substituted glyph highlighting in the preferences. To fix this, go to your preferences > Composition > and turn off substituted glyphs.
I also recommend that when-ever you are converted a quark file. You will want to clean it up by exporting your newly converted file as an inx and then re-open it to clean up the file. Although it might be interesting to try exporting it as an IDML and reopen it to see if that does an even better job (which I assume it does). From my experience this is good preventative maintenance since converted quark files can causes headaches. I have seen colors that won’t delete, styles that won’t stick, master pages won’t apply and other strange things.
ID Secrets has covered converting Quark files in the past.
How to get text out of a quark file
How you can round-trip flaky ID files using both Q2ID and ID2Q.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on December 5, 2008
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