Glossary of graphic design terminology and dictionary of creative concepts, pre-press, font styles, desktop publishing, typography and web design terms.

Design software news

New tool for converting QuarkXpress documents for use in InDesign

With the apparent flood of design studios that have abandoned QuarkXpress and gone over to Adobe InDesign, it was only a matter of time before a fully featured tool for converting QuarkXpress documents to the InDesign format was released.

Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign) is a one-stop conversion tool that enables InDesign to import QuarkXpress documents directly into InDesign. Q2ID will aim to convert the majority of the elements of a QuarkXpress document, including the following; page positions, color models - including Pantones and other color swatch settings, fonts and styles, images, text attributes, tables, layers, blends, runarounds, linked text boxes and anchored boxes.

Until recently Q2ID was a Mac OS X product only. But Markzware have now released a Windows version of the product, so that PC users can now import Quark Xpress documents into InDesign CS.

Go here for a full review of Q2ID.

It costs US$199, EUR€199 and £139 and is available from plugins distributor Markzware.

5 November 2005 (updated 9 May 2006)

Discuss related topics in the design forums.