Is your InDesign INDD file really a Quark QXP file?
Hi, David Dilling here from Markzware, and here is yet another interesting one. A customer sent in an email with the dreaded “I have a bad InDesign file please help me!” This one was a little bit different in that he knew it was one of those old legacy files, there were definitely issues with it, and he couldn’t quite figure it out.
The subject of this movie is “When Adobe InDesign isn’t InDesign, but QuarkXPress.” Yes follow me on this one. Come check it out on my screen here, because it is quite a common problem. In any event, I’m hearing more and more about this, and the type and creator being zapped in the file, and other issues like this. It’s very important, the file extension use and how you use it on a Macintosh, or even a Windows machine, of course, as well.
It is not as easy as just adding INDD to a QuarkXPress file and, poof, it magically it becomes an InDesign file. Visa versa, you just can’t take a JPEG, add TIFF and it becomes a TIFF file. It just does not work that way. If it did, life would be a lot simpler but that is just not so. Now come check it out on my screen and thank you for watching.
Ok, everybody, I have got an interesting one here. First of all, please excuse my messy desktop, a lot of things going on, things downloading other bad files excreta. But I’ve got this bad supposed InDesign file but there is more to this story, it does not appear to be a InDesign file ever though it says INDD and gives us the appearance of an InDesign file. CS3 is picking that up from my system here, which I have primarily running on this machine.
However, you will see, if I drop it on our advanced preflight application, FlightCheck, with CS4 with Quark 8 support. You will see right away, besides a couple of preflight errors and different things along those lines, that it is showing us that it is a Quark file. QuarkXPress file version 5, the customer did say it is quite an old file and it’s causing him problems, and he wanted to see if we can help. So, someone along the line decided to just name it INDD to see if that would just turn it magically into an InDesign file, and, obviously, it did not. You can see here clearly what’s going on with this file. Right. So, basically you get a preview with the images, which is a nice feature in FlightCheck.
In any event FlightCheck says it is a Quark file, customer claims InDesign file, so let’s just go in there and see if it is as easy as this. It will warn us if you will want to change the file extensions, it will say use QXP. Now you see it has changed into a Quark file here so lets now see what happens there. This file opens in Quark without a problem. OK, now if we save as Quark and now switch over to InDesign and use Q2ID to convert Quark files into InDesign we can now find that file that the customer thought was InDesign was actually Quark and now we can actually convert that Quark file into InDesign with Markzware FlightCheck. What FlightCheck does is run a preflight check on files, while Q2ID and ID2Q convert files.
The file conversion is complete, and that’s a wrap. Another happy customer, another interesting case, that I just wanted to share with you. We can fix your bad InDesign files, just try the Markzware File Recovery Service or email Markzware Sales and we will tell you where to send your files.
FlightCheck can preflight files to ensure print quality for document output. You see how handy FlightCheck was there just to give you a quick overview on what that file is, the customer did not know, I knew because FlightCheck told me, it was simple as dragging and dropping. Plus, we have our conversion tools: Q2ID (Quark to InDesign), ID2Q (InDesign to Quark), and Pub2ID (Microsoft Publisher to InDesign).
Alright, David signing off. Have a great day and hope this helps you.
When an InDesign INDD File Is Really a Quark QXP File
