Once there and back again

Publishing documents can be converted. Of course, XPress, InDesign, VivaDesigner or Affinity Publisher have their own document formats. However, they are no longer isolated solutions. Today there are good conversion solutions with which documents of a certain program can also be opened in another program.

The best tools are from Markzware and can be purchased right here on the Kursiv website.

• Q2ID converts XPress documents to InDesign
• ID2Q converts InDesign documents to XPress
• PDF2DTP converts any PDF document to InDesign

After the conversion, a new original domain is available. For example, if you open a QuarkXPress document in InDesign with the help of Q2ID, an original InDesign document is available when the conversion is completed (in no time at all). This can be changed, adapted, saved and used as if it were a regularly created InDesign document.

What can (not) be expected from conversions?

Conversions are never 100% identical. This has nothing to do with the conversion, but with the fact that publishing programs are not 100% the same. The interpretation of the same information and attitudes is almost the same, but there can (not: must) be differences. For example, what are the settings for text wrapping? Which special functions in one program are not supported in the other program? What is the spacing of a font? Are the settings rounded differently between different programs and is there a word that no longer fits on the page?

Conversion solutions, however good they are, cannot be used to keep moving documents back and forth. They are not suitable for the graphic artist to work in InDesign, but the customer with XPress, and for the data to be pushed back and forth in different formats.

Conversion software is intended to convert standing sentences or to do one-off conversions. You save the work, so to speak, from one program to the next software. Documents should then be checked and only then used. Years of experience have shown that you can get astonishingly close to the original document. This saves a lot of valuable time.

Anyone who uses conversion solutions has probably already earned the costs back with the first job. The only alternative would be to rebuild a document from scratch. However, if you do not have all the images but only a PDF file, for example, then a document cannot simply be rebuilt. With PDF2DTP, however, such a document can easily be converted and embedded images are exported cleanly and are then available again in InDesign.