In this case, I had to pretty much recreate every template. That was not a fast process. But then none of this went by quickly. Recreating most all text boxes on the templates took the least of my time, however.

LIBRARY:
Quark documents will open in IDCS. Quark libraries on the other hand, will not. I also have a rant about how the IDCS library works, but that is another post. The only solution is to drag all the objects from the Quark library into Quark documents. Then opening those Quark documents in IDCS and creating a IDCS library. We have many, many items in our library. Mostly everything needed to create the newspaper is in our library.

After making the IDCS library I realized the runaround problem on all the text objects. Of course it happened in that order. Minor details.

STYLES:
All the styles had little disk icons next to their names when brought into IDCS from Quark 4. This means the style is an imported style. Imported styles are bad, very, very, bad. I had to recreate every style. We use somewhere between 40 and 50 different paragraph styles.

We used no character styles. Yet with all the imported Quark 4 templates and normal documents I now have a Normal character style. It is set to Helvetica (which is the default font in Quark 4). Everything that is not set with a paragraph style is assigned this Normal character style. This means all the objects used to recreate our library as well, all have Normal assigned to them. This would not be such a big problem but when I go assigning paragraph styles, or an actual character style, I get weirdness as the paragraph styles do not work because it is competing with Normal. I had to go through and kill the Normal character style all over the place.

CONCLUSION:
I now know of many of the side effects when bringing a document from Quark to InDesign. I know there are many more, but these are the problems I faced while getting everything ready to publish the paper in IDCS.

I now know that the first thing to do is delete the Normal character style first. Doing that first, not third, is the way to go.

I don't know how to prevent any of the other headaches I encountered taking our newspaper from Quark to InDesign.

As much of a pain in the rear this was, it was needed. I have not done so much as touched InDesign before this summer. So to that end, I needed to learn IDCS hyper fast. The Total Training DVD's we bought help, but not as much as fixing up these templates to work smoothly.

More to come on this transition soon...