Q2ID Review By LaurenMarie
This is a short of Q2ID reviews by LaurenMarie. Marie is a graphic designer in CA, USA. She also runs the blog Creative Curio. This can help you to get more information about Q2ID.
By: LaurenMarie
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.
When I unzipped the product, there were 4 files, two PDFs and 2 .apln (Adobe extensions), one apln for CS2 and one for CS3. The PDFs were instructions for installing the plugin. I simply dragged and dropped the proper .apln file into my Plug-Ins folder as directed and launched InDesign.
I entered my activation code the when InDesign booted up. Installation was that easy!
Testing the Plugin
I tested a variety of Quark files, including an all-text manual created for digital output that contained links from the table of contents to specific text anchors and a simple one page flyer. I didn’t test any long documents or extremely complicated Master Page setups.
It’s quite simple to convert the documents. You just go to File>Open (Ctrl + O) and select your Quark file. Keep in mind that you will have to change File Type to All Files in order to see Quark files when you are in the Open dialog window.
Layers created in Quark seem to work perfectly well in InDesign, the colors and layer names are even maintained! I only did a very simple test (a layer with text and a layer with images), but layers are not complicated, anyway.
When I converted my QuarkXpress documents to InDesign, all the images were in their proper places. Very good! Text also transitioned well. If you’re missing fonts, you’ll get a pretty standard replace fonts dialog box and have a chance to fix them before getting into the document.
There are some significant things that are not supported by the Q2ID plugin at this time. However, bear in mind that if you are not using some of these features, it really won’t matter to you!
Conclusion
At $200 the Q2ID plugin is a little expensive for my budget, but some searching revealed to me that it is actually quite reasonably priced when compared to other such complex plugins. It’s certainly less time consuming that rebuilding your Quark files in InDesign. If you have a lot of files to convert from Quark to InDesign, I think the $200 investment is well worth it.
article source: http://markzware.com/blogs/markzware_q2id_review/2008/09/03/
Q2ID V4 the lastest versionis really good and easy to use plugin to help users to convert QuarkXpress to Adobe Indesign document as well as text and reduce cost to re-create content.
More Popular Conversion Tools:
- ID2Q – Convert InDesign to Quark – Provides Quark users to convert InDesign documents into new Quark documents easy and quick.
- PUB2ID - Convert Publisher to InDesign – Provider InDesign users to convert and migrate Microsoft Publishers documents into new InDesign files
- FlighCheck Professional helps users to create and prepare Adobe PDF files and other printing documents to manage and solve for print jobs.
