Markzware Publisher To InDesign

MARKZWARE PUB2ID v1.5.1
by Michael Shaw

In past issues of the DoubleClick we have looked at a lot of scathingly brilliant software from Markzware. (In fact, when my mother asks me about a lot of stuff she sees me doing on the computer I tell her that its magic. Markzware stuff qualifies. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic).

Markzware is famous for their FlightCheck software and their PM2Q, ID2Q and Q2ID plug-ins for QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. As such, many of you may not be familiar with their products but in the world of desktop publishing Markzware is a name associated with a long history of wonderful document conversion utilities that make it possible to radically reduce the time it takes to import and use text and pictures from documents created in other desktop publishing applications.

For people who use InDesign, Quark and PageMaker, Markzware makes plug-ins that make it possible to easily import content and convert entire documents between creator applications without losing the appearence of the original document. The magic part is that Markzware plug-ins do it quickly, accurately, and elegantly. Microsoft Publisher, a Windows only application, has historically been less well-liked among professional designers and high end commercial print shops when compared with other desktop publishing applications like PageMaker, InDesign & QuarkXPress but its very ubiquity in the corporate environment ensures its wide usage. Recent versions of the program have greater capabilities concerning color separations and proper process coloring output.

Publisher 2007 also includes the capability to output commercial press quality PDF with embedded fonts as an optional download from the Microsoft website. Publisher is included in high-end editions of Microsoft Office. This reflects Microsoft’s emphasis on Publisher as an easy-to-use and less expensive alternative to the “heavyweights” and also its focus on the small business market where firms do not have dedicated design professionals available to make marketing materials and other documents. Publisher’s proprietary file format is, unfortunately, unsupported by most other applications. This means that documents created with Microsoft Publisher can not generally be imported into more popular applications like Adobe InDesign.

When it’s time to go beyond what Microsoft Publisher can offer in the way of professional document design, it has typically been necessary to rebuild such publications from scratch in InDesign, a process that’s both slow and fraught with the possibility of introducing errors. The latest offering from Markzware, called Microsoft Publisher to InDesign, or PUB2ID, is a plug-in for Adobe InDesign that can convert all of your Microsoft Publisher into Adobe InDesign documents so you can update and work with them.

In order to use it you will need a Mac running Tiger or better or a PC running Windows 2000, XP or Vista and 250 Megs of hard drive space. PUB2ID works with InDesign v4.x or 5.x (CS2 or CS3). It provides a quick, easy and affordable method for you to migrate all your Microsoft Publisher content into new Adobe InDesign documents. The conversion is enabled with a single click using the InDesign File-> Open menu. No more re-creating documents from scratch; PUB2ID gives you a big head-start. PUB2ID translates the intricate details of the content within the Microsoft Publisher document and instantly re-creates it within InDesign. Items converted from Publisher include: page size, positioning, color models, fonts and styles, text attributes and tables, layers, word wrap, linked text boxes as well as automatic extraction of images embedded in the Publisher file. If you need to work with documents originally created in Publisher the PUB2ID document conversion technology will save you countless hours of scanning, re-keying and formatting.

This product converts and transforms files created with Microsoft Publisher into an Adobe InDesign file on either Macintosh or Windows platforms. Because of the different ways that the various publishing programs handle the same tasks, like text flow, fonts and runaround, there is a distinct possibility that the converted document will need to be tweaked a bit in order to get it looking exactly as you want it, but the minor adjustments will be far less arduous than totally re-creating the document. In common with the other Markzware conversion tools I have used, (which includes InDesign to Quark, Quark to InDesign, and PageMaker to Quark), this newly released PUB2ID v1.5 comes with the warning from Markzware that the document conversion will not be exact but the time saved will be considerable, especially if there is a large document or a large number of small documents to convert. My own experience is that this warning is more an expression of modesty that a serious disclaimer. Markzware software has a reputation for working better than expected.

Its a good idea to take a snap of the Microsoft Publisher document you intend to convert before you begin the process of importing it into InDesign. This will serve as a reminder of what the original document looked like and help you to quickly re-position and re-size text boxes and pictures if they do not automatically appear exactly as you expect. It is important to note that even though PUB2ID provides many benefits, conversion is not perfect. This is because all manufacturers of desktop publishing applications have their own unique methods of text rendering and graphical representation. Therefore, text flow and certain graphical elements will not be 100%. Depending on the use of custom kerning, tracking, leading, graphic formatting and effects, etc., more or less rework may be required, but some rework will always be required.

To use PUB2ID:
• 1. Launch InDesign. Use the InDesign -> File -> Open menu to navigate
through your files to locate your Microsoft Publisher file and click “Open”.
• 2. You will see a conversion progress bar.
• 3. The Publisher file will open on your Desktop rebuilt in InDesign.
• 4. Save this new InDesign file.
• 5. Close then re-open the new InDesign file
• 6. Re-map any missing fonts using the InDesign dialog
• 7. Images are extracted to a folder with the the Publisher file name and linked
in the new InDesign document.
• 8. Re-save the new InDesign document.

Included with the plug-in is a terrific fully-illustrated .PDF Users Guide that explains in just ten pages how the PUB2ID plug-in works. Besides the expected basics like system requirements, installation, registration and invocation there are chapters on workflow, fonts and styles, text flow, text wrap and formatting, importing images, image effects and special effects, drawing and inserting objects. The Microsoft Publisher features that are most unique to the program, like its handling of clip art, shadow styles, Design Gallery objects, auto-shapes, importing bitmap image border effects and word-art all receive special attention in the PUB2ID Users Guide.

If you simply must work with older Microsoft Publisher you need to know that there is a tool that converts files created with Microsoft Publisher into Adobe InDesign files on either Macintosh or Windows platforms. Visit the Markzware website to find out more about PUB2ID and their other programs, utilities, and plug-ins designed to make life a lot easier for those of us who simply must
yield to the urge to publish documents on our computers.

 

Upgrades, MS Publisher converter look promising

By: Kevin Slimp

Editor’s note: Newspaper industry consultant Kevin Slimp this month begins writing for Newspapers & Technology, alternating with Association of Free and Community Papers Executive Director Craig McMullin.

Help! My desk used to be under this pile of software somewhere. I keep stacking software boxes on my desk as they arrive from vendors and I can’t put off taking a few of them for a spin any longer.

Photoshop Elements 6.0

Finally, Adobe Systems Inc. released the Mac version of Photoshop Elements 6.0 in April. It reminds me of the early PDF days when Adobe would release the Windows version of Acrobat a few months before Mac users got their hands on a new product. Was it worth the wait? Depends.

Photoshop Elements is a solid product for photo editing novices and folks who need to adjust lighting and colors on images to be used in newsletters, flyers or to print out for keepsakes. And, if your newspaper includes a lot of black-and-white photos, it does a dandy job of preparing those for print. But here is the big drawback of Photoshop Elements: It doesn’t save images in CMYK format.

So who would use Photoshop Elements at most newspapers? If you have staff members who edit photos for online editions but not print, Photoshop Elements is a great option for editing photos to be saved in RGB. If you publish black-and-white photos, this application does a great job with those as well. Sure you’ll miss some features of the full version of Photoshop (as hard as I tried, I couldn’t create a clipping path in Photoshop Elements), but most of Photoshop is still there.

Let me share some of what I’ve learned using Photoshop Elements 6.0:

•Users can work on RAW images, meaning you can shoot photos at the highest resolution on your SLR camera and work on the images in Elements. Again, you’ll be limited to saving them in RGB or grayscale, but it works fine for these.

•Photoshop’s filters are still available. Go ahead. Add texture to an image or stroke it with a brush. The placement of these tools is actually a little handier in Elements.

•Tools like Shadow/Highlights, Levels and Curves are still available; you’ll just have to look in new places to find them. Shadow/Highlights and Levels are found in the Adjust Lighting submenu. Hue/Saturation and Curves are found under the Adjust Color submenu.

•Color modes are limited to Bitmap, Index Color, RGB and Grayscale.

•Several of the Automation tools found in the Bridge can be found in Photoshop Elements 6.0. A few are PDF Slideshow, Web Photo Gallery and Contact Sheet.

I decided to edit a photo using the same tools that I’ve always used in Photoshop and had good fortune. I was able to open and crop the photo, set the image size, adjust levels, sharpen the image with Unsharp Mask, then convert the image to grayscale before saving as an EPS, TIF or JPG image. I noticed there was no option to save an image in DCS, a format normally used with spot colors.

With such a discounted price, you wouldn’t expect Photoshop Elements to do everything as well as the full-feature version. But it stands up for itself very well. Sure, you probably won’t use Elements to create your animated GIF files (although the Help Menu insists that you can), but Elements is well worth the price for users who want to have the powerful features of Photoshop, without the need for CMYK. At $89, it’s a steal. For more information, visit adobe.com

Mac drive tool upgraded

Is your computer running slower? Drive Genius 2 is my favorite disk utility for the Mac platform. I loved the original version of Drive Genius and this upgrade doesn’t disappoint. The app makes hard-drive maintenance tasks painless, fast and easy.

Drive Genius 2 is a disk utility that features a wide array of features including directory repair, repartition on-the-fly, cloning, integrity testing, benchmarking, secure erase and several other tools to help maintain your hard drive.

Recovery is handled by another app, Data Rescue II, which can recover data from a crashed, corrupted or unmountable hard drive. The software also has the ability to recover deleted files.

The DVD allows you to boot right from the disk, so you can work directly on your main boot drive. You can run it as an application to work on other internal or external hard drives. Note that the current version of Drive Genius 2 doesn’t boot Macs using the Leopard operating system.

Drive Genius 2 lists for $99 ProSoft, which makes DG2 and Data Rescue II, offers an array of valuable utilities and applications for Mac users. For more information, visit prosofteng.com.

More help with MS Pub files

Shouts of joy could be heard throughout the publishing world when Markzware released PUB2ID, the utility that allows InDesign users to open Microsoft Publisher files. Now comes PDFOnline.com, a Web site devoted to converting Word, PowerPoint and Publisher files to PDF. Even though it’s not the perfect solution, at least you end up with a PDF file that can be placed or opened in other applications for editing and correction. I uploaded a 12-page PowerPoint file and, in less than a minute, received a 12-page PDF. It was really quite impressive. The service is free. Visit pdfonline.com for more details.

Kevin Slimp is a newspaper trainer and industry speaker. He can be reached at Kevin@kevinslimp.com.