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Opening QuarkXpress files


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As a long-time QuarkXpress user I am impressed with what I've seen of Publisher so far. You have indicated on another thread that importing InDesign documents will probably be added to a future version, so I can ask if the same will apply to Quark files?

I no longer use Quark as much as I used to and I'm still running its 2015 incarnation. For my now more limited use, upgrading is not a cost-effective option. I already use Photo and Designer, so Publisher would fit neatly into my workflow as an alternative to Quark.

Publisher still has quite a few rough edges, particularly with how it handles images and the bizarre implementation of the art-board, where normally I like to write text, try out different things and run text overflows during the editing process. I find the default implementation of black backgrounds equally bizarre in an application aimed at those who work in print. Who in their right mind would print on black paper?

You will be on to a winner if Publisher becomes an app that looks like it was intended for print, rather than one simply ported over from the web environment.

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Welcome to the Affinity forum.  I'm not sure I follow your comment about the art boards.   You can change the interface into a light version by opening the application preferences and changing the User Interface preference settings.  That dialog box will also let you change the color of the art board background. In the screen capture below, I've set the UI to the Light format, I like it better when working on Publisher.  You an also use the sliders to adjust the background gray level and the art board gray level.

I'm also not sure exactly what you mean about the art boards themselves.  If you mean that you use the area outside of the page/art board to place notes and other items, you can go to the View > View mode> Clip to Canvas to toggle being able to place items outside of the page boundary. 

Hope this helps.

Preferences 2019-04-07 22-01-04.jpg

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6 hours ago, Michael117 said:

I'm also not sure exactly what you mean about the art boards themselves.  If you mean that you use the area outside of the page/art board to place notes and other items, you can go to the View > View mode> Clip to Canvas to toggle being able to place items outside of the page boundary. 

 

Thanks Michael, that solves the issue. Bizarre default, though, because I would imagine most users would want to use art boards in exactly this way. No mention either that I could find in any of the documentation.

I've been a Quark user since the late 1980s, mostly for producing newspapers, books, magazines and newsletters. The beauty of Quark used to be its simplicity, but in recent times it's become bloated. Additional features have meant that some formatting options, previously achieved with simple keystroke combinations, have become more long-winded, not helpful in an industry working to tight deadlines, where speed is of the essence.

Two other areas where I feel Publisher needs attention is in colour handling and typographical default settings. I would like to see the Swatches palette developed to allow for the naming of colours so that they can be identified more readily. At the moment if you have similar shades in the same swatch it's difficult to distinguish one from another because of the tiny square of colours. I would also like to see the option of a default setting for leading, for instance, instead of having to set in every single Text Style.

Keyboard shortcuts are always important to smooth and efficient working and in my view Publisher doesn't at the moment strike the right balance with its shortcuts. Too many apply to little used options and not enough to ones users like me need.

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8 hours ago, Michael117 said:

I'm not sure I follow your comment about the art boards.

I think that @Xpresso is referring to the background (the area outside of the pages) as the "art board", perhaps not realizing that "artboard" is an Affinity term with a different meaning. You seem to be doing that, too. The slider that controls the color of the background is the "Background grey level". The "Artboard background grey level" applies only to the situation where you have opened a .afdesign document in Publisher and chosen not to convert the artboards to spreads.

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  • 10 months later...
On 4/7/2019 at 9:01 PM, Xpresso said:

As a long-time QuarkXpress user I am impressed with what I've seen of Publisher so far. You have indicated on another thread that importing InDesign documents will probably be added to a future version, so I can ask if the same will apply to Quark files?

Hi everybody,

I'm new here and currently evaluating the publisher as an alternative for Quark. I'm facing the same task as you and started my evaluation with recreating some documents with publisher. I believe, the easiest way to transfer your documents is to export them in Quark as PDF and then to re-import in Publisher. Not perfect, as the frames are not recreated in the same way (headers for example make a mess in the document structure). With some afterwork you should be able to recreate your documents. The good news is, that fonts and font attributes are correct, that the images are positioned correctly and the text quite often needs to be rearranged in frames. Maybe affinity can do some work on the PDF-import to keep the objects?

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3 hours ago, Andreas S said:

some work on the PDF-import to keep the objects?

The problem is that this information is not stored in the PDF to begin with so the Affinity products have no way to retain the information - it simply isn't there by the time it enters the program.

Even the context of a text box is foreign to PDF; it really wasn't designed as an interchange format.

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On 2/28/2020 at 9:08 PM, fde101 said:

The problem is that this information is not stored in the PDF to begin with so the Affinity products have no way to retain the information - it simply isn't there by the time it enters the program.

Even the context of a text box is foreign to PDF; it really wasn't designed as an interchange format.

The PDF format stores text blocks and graphics in objects. If you take a document generated by Quark Xpress as PDF export and edit the PDF in Acrobat, you are able to see the structure of objects and to modify them. The object structure of Quark files is mostly kept, multicolumn text is split in one object per column and paragraphs are also separated in different objects in PDF. The Publisher seems to merge some of the objects - for me it looks more or less random and this merge is the cause of a lot of re-work to be done to the import result.

I know that PDF has never been designed as an interchange format, but the designers of the different DTP programs have a big interest that nobody else can read their formats or create import filters for their native format, so a change from Quark to Indesign to Affinity Publisher or vice versa is made as difficult as possible. So at least in case of Quark we should be happy, that Quark doesn't try to obfuscate the generated PDF, but to keep the structure of the original document.

And as Affinity is a newcomer in this market, they surely have a vital interest in making the move from other applications as easy as possible for their customers.

Edited by Andreas S
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I had no problem opening a multipage PDF made from a QuarkXpress document. Affinity Publisher made a document with multiple pages. Text was editable, photos were editable. Opening dialogue page enabled me to update the fonts that hadn't been turned on.  Had to recreate style sheets for the text. When I was done making changes, it exported as a PDF (print) easily.

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