Technically moving documents from Quark 4 to InDesign CS (IDCS) is an easy transition. Quark 4 files open in IDCS just fine. Styles and Libraries are a different thing all together. However some of the objects on the documents came over to IDCS with some weirdness to them. This is a "real world" account of moving from Quark 4 to InDesign CS. Just because we are a college newspaper does not mean our production process is any easier or less complicated then a newspaper with a much larger circulation in a small or large city. I have seen first hand newspapers in different markets, and that myth is not true at all.

You may want to read the first part of this series.

DOCUMENTS:
We use many templates for front and inside section pages. Opening these in IDCS had all but no ill effects. The one problem was the weird runaround on objects. Even though the Text Wrap palette in IDCS says there is none on the objects. This happened on both text and picture boxes. I had a lot to do, so the things that did not absolutely need to be recreated didn't get special treatment. Later I might recreate all page objects "the right way."

This amounts to about 4 points of margin on the inside of the text boxes. That is not good when you are trying to align headlines with body copy, photos, and other page objects that need to align to a strict grid. I checked in Quark, to see if the original objects had a small runaround value on them. None of them did. This weird runaround was on all objects, not just ones on the templates themselves, but also objects from our library.

For objects that are center aligned, this 4 point "margin" is no problem. I had to, however, recreate all objects that have left or right aligned text in them. The picture boxes that were brought over from Quark to IDCS had runaround applied to the outside, not the inside like the text boxes. In most cases that is not a problem, so I did not have to recreate many picture boxes.

Now here is another wrinkle in this mess. Some text boxes came over to IDCS with no runaround (the way they should) but this was too few and way too far between to be called a trend.

I do not know if this peculiar runaround (now called text wrap in IDCS) is something that always happens when moving Quark documents to ID, I cannot imagine it happens all the time. I have not had the time to test this myself by making a new document in Quark 4 and bringing it into IDCS. I imagine when I get a chance to try that out, I will not see runaround on the objects. I will have to see. I don't even have OS 9 on my TiBook much less Quark 4, so I will have to try this out at work tomorrow.