Adobe Certified Instructor Reviews App: Open InDesign in File Formats

Adobe Certified Instructor, Chad Chelius reviews Markzware’s IDMarkz app to open InDesign files in many file formats, as well as to preview, convert, and export InDesign:

Markzware develops print, publishing, and graphic arts software. IDMarkz, the standalone macOS app to open InDesign files in several file types, including QuarkXPress, Affinity Publisher, older versions of InDesign, Illustrator, IDML, PDF, PNG, and more. Use InDesign content from a newer InDesign version file, in an earlier InDesign version file, including InDesign CS6.

Chad Chelius is an ACI / Adobe Community Professional, who teaches and speaks on Adobe products to users worldwide. In this Markzware video, David Dilling interviews this graphic design expert/trainer, who uses many methods to teach multiple aspects of using Adobe InDesign:

The “Adobe Certified Instructor Chad Chelius on new InDesign Exporting software” video is on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it1p2jQqr58
Here is the transcript:

DAVID: Chad, how are you? I’m good, thank you. We’ve been chatting a little bit. I just called Chad on the Skype, here, and he’s been an IDMarkz beta tester and been checking it out, before. It just came out, yesterday. But, before we jump into that, Chad, maybe you can give us a little, brief background about who you are and what you do.

CHAD: Yeah, certainly. I am a basically, primarily a trainer. I’m an Adobe Certified Instructor, but I go around to companies, throughout the U.S., and other countries, as well, providing training and consulting on all the Adobe products. And that ranges from typical training, to workflow solutions that the clients are struggling with, to try to figure out solutions for.

DAVID: Right. You’ve also written some books I saw just recently, an Illustrator book, I believe.

CHAD: Yeah, my latest book is the Adobe Illustrator Learn Book and that was published a few months ago. And, then, I’m also a LinkedIn Learning Author, formerly lynda.com. So, I do a lot of video training content on there, as well.

DAVID: Oh, cool and how is that? Is that working out pretty good? I noticed a lot of chatter about that, lately, well, last couple… last year or so.

CHAD: Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s a fantastic way to learn. The quality of the content is amazing. Certainly a lot of people go to YouTube and there’s certainly good content there, but LinkedIn Learning really does a good job of getting experts in the field to produce that content. So, it’s a really good product.

DAVID: Now, you were telling me, just a moment ago, you’re traveling, like every week, somewhere else. You were at Adobe MAX, recently, as well.

CHAD: Yeah. Yeah, I spoke at Adobe MAX. This was the fourth or fifth year that I have spoken at Adobe MAX.

DAVID: Wow!

CHAD: And I presented on creating interactive content in Adobe InDesign.

DAVID: Oh, awesome!

CHAD: So, the kind of content …

DAVID: Oh, I have a lot of questions for you, ahead. Boy, I’ve had a lot of fun trying to create interactive documents in InDesign, I’ll tell you.

CHAD: Yeah, yeah. There’s certainly limitations to it.

DAVID: Yeah.

CHAD: But it’s a great way for people who have experience in InDesign and are able to kind of, like, move into another medium.

DAVID: Right.

CHAD: You know a lot of people want to get into interactivity, but are a little intimidated by learning Animate, or After Effects, or you know, and that’s something you don’t pick up, in a few days.

DAVID: No, not at all.

CHAD: That’s a big one, when you need to work with InDesign. And, again, there are limitations, but it’s a great way that you could create some pretty rich projects, and tasteful and classy projects, interactively, using InDesign.

The idea that print is dead? That certainly has not come to fruition, and I don’t see it coming to fruition. It’s certainly declined and certainly newspapers are struggling, but those skills that us, as print people, print designers, have are still quite valuable.

DAVID: And, oh yeah. And packaging is just exploding, I mean, if anything, I think that’s even growing. So, …

CHAD: Yeah. Definitely, definitely.

DAVID: Interesting. Yeah, well, I’ll put some links to Chad’s various avenues, on Twitter, and his webpage. Obviously, he’s an expert on InDesign, Creative Suite, etc. So, if you have any questions, contact Chad. Now, on that note, what are your impressions on Markzware‘s IDMarkz, the new standalone application we just came out with?

CHAD: Yeah, I was working with IDMarkz and I’ve been, for a few weeks now. And I really was a bit impressed by the integration that’s been built into it.

I can definitely see marketing people, I can definitely see people who are not on the design side, who need access to the file, being able to leverage IDMarkz, to generate a number of different outputs, without having to go directly to the designer, allowing them to do it themselves, …

DAVID: Right.

CHAD: … which I think it’s a real powerful thing and it’s something that, currently to do, companies have to invest a fair amount of money, to make it happen. I mean, certainly they would need a copy of, at the very least, InDesign.

Quite often, more than one product, which means what are we at, like, 50 some dollars a month, for that subscription? And, if you’ve got several marketing people, that’s a fairly significant investment, for somebody who really doesn’t need the product in its full functionality.

So, IDMarkz kind of steps in between those two and says, “Hey, listen. Let’s be able to take that InDesign document and create a JPEG or a PNG of the cover of our magazine, to post on social media, or…”

DAVID: Yeah.

CHAD: I could think of so many avenues that you can go with that.

DAVID: Right. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I think definitely for marketing people. And what do you think for, well, let me ask you this, first. How about some of the features like, for instance, the Preview your InDesign file and Export to PDF. How is that looking?

CHAD: Yeah, I mean, I can see a number of different, I mean, again, I do a lot of consulting. So, I can see this product being a viable solution for some of these clients. Adobe InDesign recently added the ability to import PDF comments …

DAVID: Oh, yeah.

CHAD: … which I’ve been leveraging that, in a lot of workflows, and what I was really impressed with, with IDMarkz, was the fact that somebody using IDMarkz can take that InDesign file, make a PDF, add the comments, send it back to the designer, and the designer can import those comments and have those changes applied in InDesign. So, …

DAVID: Right.

CHAD: … That’s it. That was really impressive. I was expecting it not to work, to be honest, because I’m usually the one that breaks the products …

DAVID: Yeah

CHAD: … or finds the pitfalls.

DAVID: Right.

CHAD: And when I tried it, I was like, “Son of a gun! This works!” Yeah, I was really impressed. It was a great discovery.

DAVID: Yeah. Here’s another question. A little off the cuff, actually, but have you tried the Affinity Publisher product, at all yet?

CHAD: I have tried it. So, the answer is yes, I have. And, to be quite honest, it’s not a bad product. I found it. If you know InDesign, you know Affinity Publisher. It was like, “Okay. Yeah, I can work in this document.” I use InDesign, at a pretty intense level.

DAVID: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

CHAD: So, I quickly was discovering, like, those …

DAVID: Limitations?

CHAD: Yeah. Where do I do this? And you discover that it’s just not fair, but I certainly see it viable for flyers, newsletters, trifold brochures.

DAVID: Yeah. Basic, yeah.

CHAD: I mean, you can totally get away with it, in Publisher.

DAVID: Yeah, yeah. Actually, I just mentioned that, as one of the other “Open In” possibilities, with IDMarkz. You can open a file automatically …

CHAD: Yeah.

DAVID: … InDesign files, all automatically, in Publisher, QuarkXPress, Acrobat, like you just mentioned, even Illustrator, so, …

CHAD: Yeah.

DAVID: I don’t know how useful that would be, but maybe, sometimes, you could have complicated, intricate …

CHAD: Yeah.

DAVID: So, …

CHAD: You never know or you have a graphic. A lot of times, even myself, I will draw fairly simple graphics, directly in InDesign, just because the Pen tool is the pen tool. You’re there.

DAVID: Yeah.

CHAD: Whether it’s Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, it works the same. So, rather than jumping over to Illustrator, I’ll often do simple graphics, right in InDesign. But, then, you might be in a situation, where you’ve got to do more complex editing to it and you’re like, “Okay. Now, we’ve got to go into Illustrator and certainly, again, to your point, I can copy and paste into Illustrator, certainly, but you never know how we might well leverage that.

DAVID: Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. You already covered this, Chad, to a certain degree, but obviously IDMarkz is interesting for people using older versions of InDesign, because you can immediately make an IDML out of the file and automatically open an older version of InDesign, one of the other features of IDMarkz. So, for CS6 users, or what have you, they can open newer versions in their older version. Yeah. Fantastic!

CHAD: Listen, I had a student, in class, this past week, who’s still using CS4 and they’re a government client. I can’t tell you which agency, but it doesn’t really matter.

DAVID: Yeah.

CHAD: But they’re still on CS4.

DAVID: Yeah.

CHAD: And I can only imagine they run into this, day in and day out. So, …

DAVID: Well, let them know about IDMarkz.

CHAD: I definitely will. I definitely will, because, I mean, you can’t tell me that they’re not constantly running into this problem, because …

DAVID: Right.

CHAD: … for marketing, for anybody, I mean, I can even see, even in service-provider organizations, …

DAVID: Yeah.

CHAD: I could totally see customer service representatives opening up the file, before they … because they might be able to quickly see like, “Oh, this is the wrong size,” …

DAVID: Yeah.

CHAD: … or “Oh, this has three spot colors and that’s not what the job had indicated.”

DAVID: Yeah.

CHAD: So, I could see them, without them needing a product like FlightCheck.

DAVID: Right.

CHAD: Because FlightCheck is for somebody …

DAVID: It goes deeper.

CHAD: … who’s knowledgeable about …

DAVID: Yeah, it goes way, way deeper.

CHAD: But, for a quick look at the file, to make sure (A) Is it the right document? Is it the right project? (B) What are the colors in there? (C) The document size? And I think that would help, in a lot of cases, for them to kind of be the, I don’t know what you want to call it, but the front man, if you will, to avoid wasting time, further in the watch.

DAVID: Right. Back. Yeah. Yeah.

CHAD: Right. Yeah, they can get a quick idea what the file is and …

DAVID: Yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. Yeah.

CHAD: Keep up the good work and, for anybody out there, check out all of the great products that Markzware makes. I just referred you guys to somebody on the Adobe forums, this week, who was trying to … They didn’t have the source InDesign document anymore. They only had a PDF, and I said, “You’ve got to check out Markzware, to be able to do that.”

DAVID: PDF to InDesign [PDF2DTP].

CHAD: Yeah, PDF to InDesign [PDF2DTP] allows you to convert that and it gets people out of a lot of jams.

DAVID: Yeah, well, thank you, Chad. And just throw it back to Chad, on that one, I’ll have to say, on the Adobe forums, you see Chad a lot, giving comments and feedback, to help people over there, which is really good, as well. So, good job!

CHAD: Thank you so much!

DAVID: Cool. Well, Chad, thank you very much for your time …

CHAD: Thank you.

DAVID: … out of your busy schedule. We really appreciate it and, yeah, until the next time.

CHAD: Absolutely. We’ll see you soon.

DAVID: Alright.
[End of Transcript]

BENEFITS OF IDMarkz include:
• save time on processing Adobe InDesign files
• have flexibility to get your InDesign content into many formats
• save money on InDesign macOS compatible software without CC subscriptions

With IDMarkz, you can check archived InDesign files, without opening them in Adobe InDesign. Users can see the version of the InDesign document you are checking.

FEATURES IN IDMarkz include:
• Preview
• Open in earlier InDesign versions
• Open in QuarkXPress
• Open in Affinity Publisher
• Open in Acrobat and Annotate (Using Acrobat DC and
InDesign CC 2019 with older InDesign files)

No need to ask Creative Cloud users to send an IDML file. QuarkXPress users can also import IDML files, since the QuarkXPress app now has the ability to do so.

BUY IDMarkz
You can buy Markzware’s low-cost IDMarkz Mac Subscription, which includes IDMarkz updates, throughout your 12-month subscription term. For more information, please visit the IDMarkz page. Additional Markzware products are available via the Products page.

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Adobe Certified Instructor Reviews App: Open InDesign in File Formats