Special Report Printing, Paper & Production
After using it for about two months, Lazarus says, Q2ID has enabled his team to cut QuarkXPress out of its workflow. "I no longer have to support Quark in my department, but I can continue to maintain our six-plus-year library of Quark documents as a live resource."
As with most digital content conversion tools, Q2ID doesn't always provide a 100-percent success rate, according to Lazarus. "Any conversion process will cause changes to the original document, and we expected this to be the case," he notes. "But thankfully, the problems are minor. Every QuarkXPress document we've converted to date has maintained its formatting and general layout characteristics."
While Logomark doesn't plan to upgrade its QuarkXPress license in the future, Lazarus says he plans to keep the current version on hand, "to access those files that may not open in InDesign using Q2ID. But so far, I haven't found one," he adds.
For Logomark, it doesn't appear the company will have immediate need to back content out of InDesign documents and pour it into QuarkXPress. But that could, in fact, be a requirement for other catalog
publishers. Not to fear, there's a tool for that, too. Markzware also offers a plug-in aptly called ID2Q, which enables content creators to bring native InDesign applications into QuarkXPress.
Gretchen A. Peck is a freelance writer based in Abington, Pa. The former editor in chief of Book Tech the Magazine and PrintMedia, Peck has covered the printing and publishing industries for more than a decade. She welcomes feedback at gpeck1225@msn.com.
Money-Saving Tips for Print Production
Here, industry veterans share practical advice to trim time and expense from your catalog production process.
#1 Trim down. "Reduce your catalog's trim size just a little, and do it horizontally," suggests Dan Sayin, vice president of sales for Catalogs America, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based catalog printer. "If your [catalog's] weight is less than one pound, for every eighth of an inch you shave, you'll save about 1.5 percent of paper and 1.5 percent of postage. You can save postage by reducing it vertically also, but you'll be throwing away a lot of paper, since most printing presses are built with a fixed vertical component."
