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Re: Quark and ID file import
by Bob Claborne on Thursday 24/Feb/2005, @16:52
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Craig,
A most interesting perspective. I can tell you from experience that you are certainly correct. It is hard, very hard to do.
We have had some experience in the file conversion business ourselves. Two successful commercial products in fact, although they go in a different direction... PageMager to Quark and InDesign to Quark.
The tricky part, as you correctly pointed out, is that these DTP formats are proprietary and thus generally unintelligible. We have over 10 years experience with this sort of thing and have learned the file format layouts of most of the popular DTP applications including Quark.
Our original purpose (and that for which we are best known) is to preflight these files. That is to say, inspect them for design elements that would cause a print output problem for a commercial printer.
Since we can "see into" these file formats, we have now turned this patented technology towards extracting the content into XML. Our goal is not just the content but the layout, page geometry, font use, text and image box positions and size, etc. In short, XML tagged with all the formatting information one would require to reconstitute the original document in another application. So, Quark to XML to InDesign for instance.
You mentioned "...slurping text and images from Quark 6..." which is essentially, what we can do today (for Quark V3.1 to 6.x). In addition, we have developed a plugin for InDesignCS that can read the resulting XML and reconstruct the document.
Of course this is still a work in progress and, as you mentioned, there are many factors (and customer expectations) to be considered. I can certainly understand the context of your comment "...inaccurate import can be worse than no import at all..." but cannot completely agree with it. Our considerable experience with our other conversion products has taught us that some reasonable degree of accuracy is far better than doing the document over from scratch.
Nevertherless, your point is well taken and we are determined to overcome the barriers.
Our conversion philosophy goes beyond simply converting X2Y. There are hundreds of hungry XML enabled applications out there and thousands of potential customers with vast libraries of legacy DTP content they would like to feed into their variable data publishing, content syndicating, content repurposing, et.al. engines and we aim to supply the XML conversion technology to emancipate that proprietary content.
Did I mention that this is not an XTension? We can inspect and convert these files as a stand-alone application.
Anyway, it is a rather significant challange but there is hope. If you would like to "...slurp text and images from Quark..." and import them into InDesignCS, drop me a note and I'll provide a ßeta of our application, code-named XMLazarus.
Regards,
Bob Claborne
Director Business Development
Markzware |
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