#Q2id upgrade mac os x
#Q2id upgrade plus

This lets you keep the leading at 3 points greater than whatever the point size is, as you experiment with font sizes. The difference that affected this project the most was that QuarkXPress allows you to define leading in relative amounts, such as +3 points. There are just too many differences between the features in QuarkXPress and InDesign. As Markzware clearly states in their promotional material and in the documentation available from the Help menu, Q2ID does NOT convert with 100% fidelity. Other than a few slight changes to line breaks and pagination caused by InDesign handling leading and hyphenation differently from QuarkXPress, and text wrapping differently around some images, the conversion was fairly accurate.

#Q2id upgrade mac os x

(On my MacBook Pro with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 8 GB of memory, running Mac OS X 10.9.4.)

#Q2id upgrade plus

The conversion of this 665 page document containing mostly text took 4 minutes, plus an additional 3 minutes for InDesign to display it. Q2ID then happily converted the 9.1 document. The quick solution was to open the document in QuarkXPress 10 and export it as a QuarkXPress 9.1 document. Our challenge was that, for whatever reason, Q2ID froze when attempting to convert the QuarkXPress 10.1 document. (You can even batch-convert multiple QuarkXPress documents by holding down the Shift or Command/Ctrl keys and selecting multiple documents in the Open dialog.) Or, even more seamlessly, you can simply use InDesign’s standard File > Open dialog box, which magically now shows QuarkXPress documents. It’s not that Q2ID is difficult to use - converting a QuarkXPress document is as easy as choosing a menu item: Getting to the moment of actually seeing our layout in InDesign had some challenges as well. (In the screenshot above, the QuarkXPress spread is viewed at 130%.)

InDesign is more accurate - QuarkXPress displays pages 30% smaller than their actual size, so to see a realistic representation of the pages required zooming in to 130%. The second surprise was in how each program displays a page at “100%” size. Quark’s advantage in this area is especially valuable when working with Chinese characters, which require more attention than the English characters I’m more familiar with. QuarkXPress displays text much more clearly than InDesign does.

My first disappointment wasn’t the fault of Q2ID: it was the difference in text clarity (and therefore production efficiency for my eyes). The results were as good as I could have hoped for: So, we turned to Markzware’s time-tested plug-in for converting QuarkXPress documents to InDesign, Q2ID. (A decade earlier, we used QuarkXPress to produce his award-winning clinical desk reference Chinese Herbal Patent Medicines.)īecause Adobe recently beefed up the EPUB features in InDesign, we thought it would be smart to “future proof” the new book by converting it to InDesign CC 2014.

Earlier this year, I assisted in the production of Essential Chinese Formulas, a book of Chinese herbal medicines. We used QuarkXPress 10 because of its robust support for East Asian languages, and the author’s previous familiarity with QuarkXPress.