Q2ID CS3 is an upgrade of Markzware’s venerable conversion plug-in. It converts QuarkXpress 7 files into InDesign CS3 documents, and lives in the InDesign CS3 plug-ins folder. Q2ID CS3 works wonders, although some capabilities of QuarkXPress 7 are not translated at all. The disadvantage of Markzware’s plug-in is there is nothing for reviewers to show: no preferences, no dialogues, nothing to show in screenshots—it just works.

A desktop publishing conversion application can only convert one layout into another when both applications more or less share the same feature set. QuarkXPress 7 and InDesign CS3 differ in some respects, and Q2ID CS3 reflects those differences by translating a QuarkXPress 7 layout in a way that InDesign CS3 understands most of it.

I must admit that the plug-in does a wonderful job of page element conservation, i.e. all elements on a page stay in the same location and have roughly the same characteristics as far as I could see. But the different capabilities of QuarkXPress 7 in the area of transparency and gradients are not translated to something similar in InDesign CS3 --simply because that is impossible.

I tested the new Q2ID CS3 plug-in by creating a document with transparent text over an image in QuarkXPress 7. The plug-in enables you to open the QuarkXPress 7 document in InDesign CS3 as if it were an original InDesign layout. However, the transparency was gone --I didn’t expect much else, given the fact that text transparency such as applied in QuarkXPress 7, is unknown to InDesign CS3.

Instead, the text was just there without any transparency applied. The image was still in the same place where I put it. This remark also applies to the layers, by the way.

In short, Q2ID CS3 enables users to quickly convert a layout from QuarkXPress 7 to InDesign CS3, after which only some details need to be taken care of. Of course, even Q2ID CS3 can’t prevent the latter to be quite tedious when you’re handling a large document. Nevertheless, the time savings that you can rely on when using Markzware’s plug-in, are considerable; you can skip the whole process of setting up the same layout in InDesign CS3 again.