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.
Angelique is from Holland, but her Francias is fantastic. (I guess it did not hurt to live in lovely Strasbourg for a semester!) Here we hear and see a complete demonstration of Markzware’s QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign conversion tool, Q2ID, in French.
Convertir un fichier QuarkXPress au fichier Adobe InDesign
La conversion est surprenament complète, mais normalement un peu daméliorations sont nécessaire. Vous pouvez voir que la position du texte et des images et les couleurs sont converties. Cest un programme très facile pour tous les individus qui désirent convertir des fichiers quark aux fichiers InDesign.
Dave Matthews heads up the prepress department at Progressive Printing, a Martinsburg, WV commercial printing facility. Long plagued by Microsoft Publisher files submitted by a typical (in the commercial print world) customer base that’s ill-equipped and uneducated in the process of preparing digital content for print, Matthews discovered Markzware’s PUB2ID plug-in.
Markzware followed up with Matthews some months later to find out how the application had helped solve some of the conversion problems he’d been facing when dealing with Microsoft Publisher files, and he was gracious to share his thoughts:
Back when I wrote the Quark for InDesign Users articles, I was approached by Markzware, a company that makes several Quark and InDesign plugins. I know the folks over at InDesign Secrets love plugins, but I’ve never used any myself. Markzware kindly agreed to give me a copy of their plugin to try out and I thought I’d share with you some of my thoughts!
Install and Activation
For reference, I tested the Q2ID plugin on Windows XP SP2 with QuarkXpress 7.3 (Passport) and InDesign CS3.
Markzware is constantly looking for new ways to communicate and share the features and benefits of our conversion and preflight products. To this ends, we have joined a new and very exciting video site called Blip.tv. Here is what they call the embedded Markzware player below. Just click on it and watch!
The direct link to the Markzware Show channel on Blip.TV is http://markzware.blip.tv/. Enjoy the hopefully informative and educational videos and feel free to share with your co-workers and customers, for a well-made (preflighted) print-job is worth it’s weight in gold!
Despite all the gains and benefits of computer-to-plate (CTP) imaging and digital design, the process of creating compelling packaging designs is actually more complicated than ever. In the days of film, it didn’t matter what creative application you may have been using — Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXPress, for example — because in the end the creative work became film, which any packaging manufacturer could accept.
Then came CTP, and film stepped aside and allowed digital workflow to take center stage. No longer was film trafficked; rather, digital files became the means for exchanging packaging content. And suddenly, it became increasingly important what design application a creative director may be using, and what types of digital file formats a package printer may (or may not) accept.
Based in Cornelius, NC, The Moore Creative Company opened its doors in August of 1997 as a graphic design shop owned by Ran Moore and his wife, Jennifer. When the company was born, it was 100-percent devoted to graphic design for print intentions — an eclectic mix of jobs, from brochures and letterhead, to billboards and vehicle graphics. The company primarily targeted the local commercial and residential real-estate industries.
Adobe announced Acrobat Pro 9, the next version of its PDF viewing and editing application, along with Creative Suite 3.3 on Monday. Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 will include native Flash support, enhanced collaboration tools like PDF Portfolios, improved print production tools, and support for Adobe PDF Print Engine 2.
PDF Portfolios lets Acrobat users bundle documents, images and videos together as packages with summaries, create PDF forms and collect and analyze form data without requiring IT department involvement. Portfolios are compatible with the new (in beta) Acrobat.com hosted services that support document collaboration.
Below is a press release from IT Enquirer on a recent, detailed ROI (Return On Investment) report they did on Markzware’s Q2ID or QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign conversion plugin. As you can see in this chart, a single license of Q2ID can have a first year ROI of over 1,000 %*! That is amazing. See exhibit from IT Enquirer report here:
* Make note: This report is using ONLY five files over a year period as an example and even with only so few, the ROI is over 1,000 percent- likely many publishers and advertising agencies will have many more than that, making the return on investment really incredible.
