Many companies have been integral to digital printing since the day Caxton spread pressed inky fingers to paper. Adobe and Quark are obvious examples, alongside them are the smaller niche products made in someone’s spare bedroom or garage. One of these old timers is Markzware here. Born 1989 in a Santa Ana mobile home where their first application, XState, was developed as a project management XTension for QuarkXPress.
Markzware’s first major product, MarkzTools is still on sale today and arose from co-founder Patrick Marchese’s need to keep his job at a major advertising company. He was working with QuarkXPress but his colleagues couldn’t open his jobs in their earlier versions. Facing possible redundancy as a result, he asked Markzware partner, Ron Crandall, to come up with a converter for QuarkXPress documents. MarkzTools were born. This was soon followed by a Pagemaker to Quark converter, and again, spurred from personal necessity at the advertising agency, in 1995 FlightCheck, the first pre-flight tool.
While QuarkXPress was the de facto industry standard, document conversion became less of a problem. As soon as Adobe’s inDesign grabbed market share the need was there for another batch of converters. Markzware have given me copies of their latest versions of MarzTools, Quark to InDesign and inDesign to Quark converters to play with.
MarkzTools
I started using QuarkXPress at version 3, even now at version 7 a feature common to them all has been the ability to screw up. QuarkXPress gets its knickers in a twist just because an imported Word document has clashing style sheets or an image is not to Quark’s liking. Usually this just crashes the application and hopefully leaves one or two rescue documents as a starting position. Sometimes the whole document can be corrupted, or won’t open at all.
This is where MarkzTools come to the rescue by offering various ways to salvage the offending document. Each process by-passes the more likely trouble-makers one-by-one, such as complex run-arounds (a regular Quark crasher), applied style sheets and picture imports. A last resort is the option to extract all text from a document. Markzware also magnanimously offer to try to salvage the document for you. Not bad for a £139 tool.

Having no corrupted documents to try it on, Markzware kindly provided some for me. They arrived without icons, no indication of what they were and trying to open them in QXP6 and 7 caused them to crash. However, using MarkzTools they quickly converted into perfect documents with everything in place, all typefaces defined and as usable pieces of work.
MarkzTools could be a time and career-saver should the need arrive and while I’m grateful to Markzware for letting me test it out. I hope I’ll never need it but having a copy around gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling of safety. For a large organisation it is a no-brainer to have a copy of MarkzTools to hand… just in case.
Verifying
As well as rescue options, MarkzTools can prevent saving a corrupted document by offering to verify its integrity before overwriting a previous clean version. This doesn’t guarantee the document is 100% perfect or QuarkXPress will open it. Instead MarkzTools determines the chance of it rescuing the document and that nothing untoward is discovered.
Converting
The final act in MarkzTools’ repertoire is to export or convert a QuarkXPress 6 or 7 document back to version 4.1. Obviously there are features in the later versions beyond the comprehension of earlier editions of the program. To test this we converted some flyers full of layers, drop shadows, transparency effects and 21st century fancy must-haves. Then opened them in QuarkXPress 4.11 and 5.01.

In general the documents converted well and took no longer than a normal save would. The drop shadows and image effects were missing. Items on separate layers were moved to the top but they did stay in the correct sequence. QuarkXPress 4 did not support layers and needed the QX Tools which were installed. One image moved out of position for some reason in both QXP4 and 5 but everything else was faithfully copied across including cut-out paths made within QuarkXPress 7. QuarkXPress 4 crashed trying to open one document that caused QXP 5 no problem.
More basic documents within the scope of QuarkXPress earlier versions converted almost 100% correct, with minor text glitches where manual kerning or baseline shifts had been applied. This doesn’t mean the file would be good enough to use for final printing and a further stage of tweaking and proofing would be needed but at least files could be passed to Luddites and tight wads who haven’t updated their software.

Converting to and from QuarkXPress and inDesign
Our work tends to be either solidly in QuarkXPress or inDesign depending on which client we are designing for. We use either program for weeks before opening the other again. This tends to make us rusty in the application we aren’t using. For quickness we stick to the application already open to do smaller pieces of work. A problem is when we have to go back to change an earlier job: a Yellow Pages ad for example, made in the alternative program. It would be tremendously helpful if QuarkXPress and inDesign could open each others files and from what we have seen from the Markzware converters, this is possible. The document converter plug-ins are simply placed into the relevant folders and the applications restarted.
QXP to ID = 8/10
Converting from QuarkXPress to inDesign is easy and effective. QuarkXPress documents show up as workable files and open as if inDesign documents. The file converts on the fly, faster than opening normally within QuarkXPress. Only minor text tweaks were needed in the files we tried, where manual kerning had been applied and text tabbed but without an accompanying stylesheet. Paragraph and character styles were imported and retained.
One table containing text and graphics needed minor amendments where in QuarkXPress the graphic would have been locked to the baseline grid. This grid was also imported along with master page items, automatic page numbers, spreads, drop shadows, image and transparency effects. The only minor gripe is that Suitcase did not automatically open the relevant fonts.
As a way to pass a QuarkXPress document on to an inDesign user, Markzware’s Q2ID is amazing. It also shows up the weaknesses of the two protagonists when they can both display the same document. inDesign is much slower than QuarkXPress but its document display is still far better than Quark’s and is far more stable.
ID to QXP = 5/10
It is a shame that the same cannot be said for converting from inDesign to QuarkXPress. From the start the process is more hands-on, having to open the document via a conversion option in the Utility menu. This brings up a dialogue box with choices for Text Attributes, Picture Previews and other options.

Documents convert rapidly but in general need a lot of work before they can be used. Some elements did not convert - text with paragraph and character style sheets applied for example. All converted to Normal even though the style sheets did convert from one to the other. However, they were not correct and if used, applied the wrong characteristics from inDesign’s. Most image effects transferred but some images shifted out of place. One simple document refused to open at all and crashed QuarkXPress.
From the documents we tried, the converter from inDesign to QuarkXpress gives a good starting point. Documents as opened in QuarkXPress would not be immediately usable as the ones converted to inDesign. Both converters handled master page items, grids, spreads and the basics of documents, even offering a choice of layouts if more than one had been used.