Here is an IDMarkz review by Karsten Risseeuw, Kursiv Founder, who gives his testimonial on Markzware’s Adobe InDesign file app to preview InDesign, convert InDesign, and export InDesign files:
Markzware is a developer of file conversion, preview, and other desktop publishing software for users of Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, Affinity Publisher, PDFs, image files and other documents used in graphic design, print and publishing. Markzware’s IDMarkz is a versatile, stand-alone application that allows users to open InDesign files in QuarkXPress, Affinity Publisher, Acrobat, and earlier versions of InDesign, plus see previews.
In this video, David Dilling interviews Karsten Risseeuw, founder of Kursiv, who provides his impressions, after testing Markzware’s IDMarkz, an “InDesign file hub” that provides several ways to help the user to make the most of the document:
The video is on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyiZGdgFaAc
Here is the video transcript:
DAVID: Can you hear me?
KARSTEN: I can hear you.
DAVID: I can hear you.
KARSTEN: Good.
DAVID: Technology at its best, huh?
KARSTEN: Wow! Amazing. Hi, David. Good to hear you.
DAVID: Yeah. Good to see you, Karsten, as well. Karsten is an IDMarkz beta tester. It’s a product that is actually still in beta, for Markzware, a new product. It’ll be coming out soon, but before we jump into that, Karsten, maybe you can tell the viewers a little bit about who you are and what you do.
KARSTEN: Yeah, sure. So, I’m, let’s say, the connection with Markzware is a long-term one. So, it’s like 20 years, or something like this, that I’m distributing Markzware products and I still do. I’m very happy to do so.
And I have a background in the graphic industry. So, I worked as a typographer and did all kind of graphic works, but quickly moved into software support and software distribution, and something which I’m still doing, now enhanced with database programming. And, so, I’m a FileMaker programmer and this is an important part of my work.
So, what I do is make the solutions for customers and a lot of my work is aimed at image manipulation, or image data, metadata, and everything, which is loosely connected to the graphic industry, and help people just get their jobs done.
DAVID: Excellent! Excellent.
KARSTEN: And the Markzware products are just products, which are easy, very well focused. And these are the kind of products I prefer, because it’s very clear what they do, and they do it very well.
DAVID: Yeah. Yeah, well said. That’s what people like about Markzware, over the years, for sure. Yeah, we’re very excited about this product and what I’m going to do now is throw it back over to Karsten and my first question to you, Karsten is, “What’s your first impression of using IDMarkz?”
KARSTEN: Oh, amazing! It’s the next big thing. It’s very easy. And I think you know, because I’m not in a daily production environment. So, as a distributor, I’m more focused on serving people with solutions, as actually using them, but I worked over time with, I think, at least eight or nine different, totally different, desktop publishing software solutions, so, on all kinds of platforms, and that’s a lot.
And it’s not just InDesign. It’s not just XPress, you know, there are a range of other programs I’ve been using. And I switched, lately, from Adobe products entirely to Affinity products.
DAVID: Wow!
KARSTEN: For my workflows, which is very… I don’t use it very much. So, the subscription model simply didn’t work for much. I have a few documents to make per year, and it doesn’t make any sense to have a subscription.
But what I see happening and I see people frustrated, because they were kind of locked in, now, obviously in Adobe products, as they, in earlier days, were locked into the dongle modes of QuarkXPress, and all these specific file formats, and people are fed up with these closed systems and what IDMarkz now does is to open up this world to a range of possibilities.
So, you have an InDesign product, you have an InDesign document, and you can just open it, even if you do not have a current InDesign subscription. I think that will answer a lot of questions, for a lot of people. And, because it’s quite reliable, as far as I tested it, so far.
There are, obviously, some things it will not be able to do. So, you always have to think the conversion is the best thing possible. And it’s very sophisticated, already, but there always are differences between the platforms.
So, people will have to carefully make a check on the document, once it’s converted, and say, “Is everything the way I want it? I probably want to add some guides or something like this, in the layout. I want to add some styles or whatever.” And you can do that, but a lot of things are truly taken apart properly from the document and put in, together anew, by IDMarkz, and that’s fantastic!
DAVID: Right. Right, and you know Affinity’s working on an IDML importer to Publisher,…
KARSTEN: Yeah.
DAVID: … and Quark already has one. QuarkXPress already has an IDML importer…
OPEN
IN
QUARKXPRESS AND MORE FILE TYPES, using IDMarkz.
KARSTEN: Yeah.
DAVID: So, this can just fit right into workflows, where people are either dabbling or switching over to other DTP applications.
KARSTEN: Switching over and also probably just working with several solutions, next to each other.
DAVID: Yeah.
KARSTEN: And that’s kind of how today’s publishing environments work. So, the idea is just Adobe is estranged, as there is just Microsoft, for example, for Office programs. It’s simply not true.
DAVID: Yeah.
KARSTEN: So, people are, I think, opening up toward other options.
DAVID: Okay. Can you hear me, Karsten?
KARSTEN: Yes, I can hear you.
DAVID: Yeah, we’re having some, I don’t know if it’s iShowU Studio or Catalina issues, but something just sometimes, or the Air Pod things, but okay. So, we got cut off, but you were just saying a studio or a school in… Well, you can say it.
KARSTEN: Yeah, it’s like an art school in Switzerland, but I don’t know which one. So, it’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s true, but I think so. So that people are considering moving away to new systems, just because it’s too expensive, or it’s just too much.
And Affinity, for example, is showing that there is an alternative, which has no subscriptions, which can be paid, and that is truly attractive. Now, it’s, by far, not the only system. I’ve been working and still work, as well, with, like, Viva Design.
DAVID: Mm-hmm.
KARSTEN: So, Affinity Designer is also a great solution, in certain respects, for certain tasks. It’s a professional solution. I work with Cumulus with iCumulus, all kind of solutions, and all these software solutions have a proper fan club and they work well.
And I work very well with InDesign, and, so, I like InDesign a lot. It’s simply that their system does not support my way of working,…
DAVID: Yeah.
KARSTEN: … because I have only a few documents per year. And, for a lot of other people, you know, it’s like they don’t want subscriptions.
DAVID: Yeah, a lot of people in Germany, or the DACH countries are very anti-subscription.
KARSTEN: Yeah, so, it basically… It’s a great solution Adobe’s offering, because you get a lot of value. If you truly work with it day and night, you have a great value at a great price, and they support all these things. So, there’s no question about it.
It’s great software. No question about it, but, for a lot of people, they say, “You know, I have a simple thing to do. I don’t need any change, but this model of subscription just locks you out of even using a document, once you decide to stop the subscription, and this is a pain …”
DAVID: Yeah, because it’s not really that expensive.
KARSTEN: It’s something people do not like.
DAVID: It’s just a pain in the neck, I think, for a lot of people, yeah.
KARSTEN: Yeah. Sorry.
DAVID: No problem. … No, but you know I love InDesign, but I have to admit, I tried Affinity, on a couple personal projects, and I found it very intuitive, and I really liked it. I could flow with it, actually easier than InDesign, even though I use InDesign every day, for hours every day.
KARSTEN: Yeah.
DAVID: It’s kind of strange.
KARSTEN: Yeah.
DAVID: Interesting.
KARSTEN: So, it’s an interesting thing and because, you know, I’ve been selling Markzware products for so long, so I know people are moving between worlds… Markzware products have been updated. This is something new, and I think it will be a game-changer, for the publishing industry. So, I’m very happy to talk about it. And thank you for inviting me.
What I like most about IDMarkz? Well, it’s very simple. It’s the simplicity of the solution. It’s really like taking an InDesign document, drag-and-drop it on the icon of the software, or open it through the menu, just as any other document can be opened, and that’s it. And, then, you can simply say in what kind of document you want to export it.
So, the simplicity of this solution, while offering a real solution to an everyday problem, is great. So, IDMarkz, its simplicity and, of course, the versatility of being able to export it to other formats, in a very easy way. That’s great!
What I like about IDMarkz, as well, is that it creates a preview. So, you don’t have InDesign. You have no preview of the document. So, you have a number of documents and you can simply open them in IDMarkz, and IDMarkz generates a preview. So, it checks on the fonts, it checks on the images, it gives a list of how many pages or text blocks or anything else that is available in the document, and you can actually flip through the pages.
So, that’s really, really helpful, because you can immediately see if the document is okay, change anything, if there are no fonts, or fonts are missing, or anything else. You can install the fonts, or work with, look for images, which are not there. So, it’s like a simple, simple, simple visual preflighting, I’d say, today. That’s really helpful!
Then, also you can automate IDMarkz. So, you can, let’s say, generate a standard output and say, “Okay, whenever you drag and draw up a document, then do this,” and that’s really helpful!
So, IDMarkz, in its simplicity, in its well-focused design. I think will be easily integrated, just by anyone, and offer the opportunity to get out of the deadlock of Adobe subscriptions into something else. That’s one option. The second option is that you have very old documents. You would like to open or create a PDF from, for example.
So, if you have an old document, say, “Okay, I don’t have to change anything.” You can simply drag-and-drop it on IDMarkz and say, “Okay, I want a PDF as an output.” So, that’s also very helpful!
Then, you can go and think about “I have a customer who works with InDesign. I don’t have InDesign.” So, I can interpret the document and output it to any other publishing solution, which is on the market, today, basically, and then create that.
So, also, if you have Viva Design, you can output an IDML file, from an InDesign document, and then import that in Viva Designer. So, that’s a really great task, which the software solves, magnificently. So, it’s a fabulous software, for that kind of task.
The biggest benefit I see from IDMarkz is that it gives the people, the designers, the publishing houses, the freedom to get out of the the padlock situation with Adobe, because Adobe does the same, much pretty much the same as what XPress did, or Quark did, in the past, locking people that had Quark. You had the dongle system in place, at the time, and Adobe is now locking everyone out.
So, even I had a valid license for Adobe product, and it was revoked by Adobe. They simply turned it off and I couldn’t get my license back, so… It was not a regular license. It was a special license but, nevertheless, it was a valid license, and Adobe’s doing this. So, they are really [irking] people and it’s not something which many people I know even want to get into. So, that’s a really bad situation and they don’t want it. So, IDMarkz, the biggest benefit is to give people back their freedom.
[End of video transcript]
Adobe InDesign CS6 file handlers can use IDMarkz to produce IDML, PDF, TIFF, PNG, JPEG and GIF files from their InDesign CS6 documents. You can get finer control of export through the Automation Preferences tab or the manual export options.
IDMarkz Benefits include:
• Saves time when handling different design versions created in Adobe InDesign
• Is quick and easy to use for seeing InDesign file content and allows editing in a variety of applications
• Saves money that would have been spent on manual file conversion, additional apps, and CC subscriptions
IDMarkz Features include:
• Preview & export InDesign files as IDML, PDF, TIFF, PNG, JPEG, or GIF
• Open InDesign files in earlier InDesign versions or in QuarkXPress, Affinity Publisher, Acrobat, Illustrator, …
• Open InDesign files in Acrobat and Annotate the PDF
IDMarkz also has automation features that can export an IDML and open it in a selected application. The InDesign, Quark, Publisher, Acrobat and Illustrator buttons (on the File Preview area in IDMarkz) are pre-set for automated workflows.
You can buy the IDMarkz Mac Subscription, which includes IDMarkz updates throughout the 12-month subscription term. For more information, please visit the IDMarkz page. Additional Markzware products are available via the Products page.
Please feel free to subscribe to the Markzware Mailing List and interact with Markzware on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and websites which publish IDMarkz-related content. We hope to see you, there!
IDMarkz Review: Karsten Risseeuw, Kursiv Founder on InDesign File App
