It was a little more than a year ago—while at the annual Design Thinkers conference hosted by the Registered Graphic Design Association in Toronto—when Michel Kurita was introduced to the Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe InDesign. Prior to the event, Kurita had been using QuarkXPress to create everything from reports and brochures to packaging, point-of-purchase displays, and trade-show collateral for the Canadian government. Kurita is a senior graphic designer, design and creative products development, Industry Canada, Government of Canada.

Preflight, in the graphic arts sense, is the process of checking a digital document before it goes to plate, print or otherwise output (exported - such as to PDF). It traditionally is a way to check quality before going to the printing press, digital or otherwise, but can also be used to check online banners and gifs. Preflight is best done on the source document, such as those created in Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXPress or Corel!Draw as some examples, before becoming a PDF (Portable Document Format). Similar to a pilot whom walks around and performs a pre take-off pre-flight check, preflighting for designers and prepress operators should be a must.

by Claudia McCue
April 2008

If like many designers you are in the process of making the big switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign, you know it is not a trivial undertaking. You have to retrain your brain to a new way of working and remind your fingers which keys to hit for those newfangled shortcuts. You are in a hurry to get up to speed, and you have just been asked to create a client’s next newsletter in InDesign. The template for the newsletter is currently in QuarkXPress. You’ve finally come to that fork in the road: Do you build a new newsletter template from scratch, or do you take the easy way out and just open the file with InDesign? If there’s a lot of work in the template, go for File > Open. While it’s surprising this works at all, you should know what converts and what does not.

XChange announce free one-day Workflow &
Productivity Seminars with software prize drawings

London, UK – XChange International, the source for extended technology worldwide, are pleased to announce two FREE one-day seminars, presenting time saving solutions for businesses — small and large — to save money and become more productive. The seminars, co-sponsored by Quark, Markzware, Enfocus and other extended technology software publishers, will be held in Central London on the 29th and 30th April 2008.

Hi everyone,

You’re invited to join the Markzware Users Group on LinkedIn.

This group is for people using, selling and integrating Markzware’s preflight and conversion tools.

Here we can network and communicate about FlightCheck, Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign), MarkzTools and PUB2ID to name just a few of our products - and engage in general graphic arts discussions too!

Joining will allow you to find and contact other Markzware Users Group members on LinkedIn.

The goal of this group is to help members:

- Reach other members of Markzware Users Group

Everyday the catalogue of QuarkXPress 7 XTensions modules is becoming larger and larger. Recently, ID2Q7 from Markzware was added to the pages of this virtual catalogue.(Read the review)