Milwaukee InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

November 17, 2005

SNIPPETS - a panel of presenters and users from the group will give examples of how to use these nifty little bits of InDesign information.

We had a very dynamic meeting, with one topic leading to another during our informative discussion of Snippets.

Members gave plenty of examples how they have used these small bits of InDesign info in their projects. Being able to quickly capture a Snippet in several ways made this a very convenient process to store and share parts of their layout.

Then we showed the process of using the .inx format to “save back” from CS2 for use in the older CS1 version of InDesign. Lots of headaches with version compatibility can be solved by using a Snippet to get usable page ingredients from CS2 into CS1. However, as expected, any CS2 new features will be lost in the process, not able to be understood by the earlier version of InDesign. We wanted to see how the CS2 features would survive through a Snippet export, and how they would land in CS1. Based on questions from the members, we rapidly built some CS2 sample files and used the .inx format to test how CS1 would “translate” the newer features…

For example:

CS2 Object Styles are lost, but all formatting stays on the object in CS1.
CS2 Drop Shadow Noise is lost, but all other Drop Shadow settings stay in CS1.
CS2 Fitting command of Fill Proportionally retained the image proportions and coordinates in CS1.
CS2 text features like Dynamic Spelling and Autocorrect were simply not available in CS1.

Discussions about translating files between versions of InDesign software of course brought up the issue of translating files between applications, specifically QuarkXPress. Even though InDesign can open QuarkXPress files up to v4 with a straightforward File>Open command, members agreed that it’s often better to rebuild the pages as a new document in order to incorporate InDesign’s features.

But sometimes you’ve just got a lot of legacy Quark files that need a quick conversion into InDesign. The main complaint… that convoluted process of saving back in Quark so that v6 and v5 files to get a QXPv4 file that InDesign can open directly. Such a hassle! (requiring a switch between Quark software versions and even between Mac operating systems to get what you need). As expected, there was a loss of newer version features during this save-back process.

New on the scene is a plug-in solution from Markzware called Q2ID (get it?) Check out http://www.markzware.com/q2id/ for more info.

We wrapped up the meeting with a drawing for design-related prizes, and there were so many donations from our sponsors that EVERYONE at the meeting won a prize!! Thanks to Adobe, O'Reilly, Peachpit, C2GPS, and Teacup Software for their generous support of the User Group!

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