InDesign Tip to Share

[urstwile]

Well, I just wanted to share this with those of you who, perhaps like me, are new to InDesign coming from Quark.

We bought the plug-in that lets us convert Quark 5 and higher files into InDesign.

A recent file I converted opened just fine, but when I put the different elements on different layers (I've read that text should always be topmost so as not to be affected by transparency and ultimately rasterizing), with my preferences set for text to recognize text wrap on underlying objects, for some reason, this one text box's content was gettin' kicked to the curb by apparently, a text wrap I just couldn't find. All the other text boxes were set to ignore the text wrap, but this one text box needed to acknowledge a text wrap (of an object that I had to the left which I needed it to wrap around). I clicked with the black arrow on every single image on the page, hunting down text wraps, couldn't find the culprit. Then I clicked with the white arrow on the background image, and voila, there was a text wrap, apparently assigned to the content!

Apparently, somewhere in the conversion, not only the background image had a text wrap on it, but the content of the picture frame also had a text wrap on it! Weird! Crazy! But true....as soon as I eliminated that, the text worked fine.

Just thought I'd share that, in case you've been wracking your brain with a similar problem.

[PrintDriver]

I don't know why it appeared in your conversion but for some reason it is very easy for a designer to assign text wrap to the content in InD rather than the frame. If you are in Direct Select tool be darn sure you hit the frame rather than the content. ESPECIALLY if the content is FPO. I hate having to go back an reassign wrap to images I have to replace with hi-res (common in wide format).

How well does that plug-in work otherwise? We've considered it from time to time but just haven't researched it to see what happens with translating Master pages and items.

[orkaknos12]

Which plugin is it? Most of the ones I've tried are crap and take lots of time to make right again once in IND CS2. I usually just end up using quark to mess with my old files.

-Jon

[urstwile]

Yes, PD, I'm still getting used to the way InDesign deals with content in frames, so I thought I'd share my experience with any others who had similar troubles. Not sure why the plug-in converted it that way, but you can bet I was very happy to accidentally find it, at least!

As to the plug-in, it's the Q2ID plug-in by MarkZware. So far, it's been working great. Obviously, with all conversion tools, at least of this type, some misinterpretation is to be expected. Also, because of the difference between the way Quark and InDesign handle tracking and kerning, I always make sure to check for any type overflow. Otherwise, everything seems to convert okay. I'd definitely say having the plug-in available is a good thing.

We're compelled to use it due to the fact that one of our clients requests that we send them native application files after we've produced an ad layout, since they repurpose the content on their end for other stuff. They use InDesign, however, and don't have the latest version of Quark. Thus, the plug-in. :)

[PrintDriver]

Markzware is ok. I kinda thought that was the one you meant. They have an InD to Quark plug too.

We try to stay native whenever possible at my job. But I've sometimes wondered if that Q>InD plug could help resurrect those corrupt Q files that seem to happen rather more often than I like.

[urstwile]

Are you referring to the unexpected end of file error? I tried it on a Quark file with that problem here, and sadly, no go. That would have been trés sweet had it worked!