Getting to the moment of actually seeing our layout in InDesign had some challenges as well. (In the screenshot above, the QuarkXPress spread is viewed at 130%.) InDesign is more accurate - QuarkXPress displays pages 30% smaller than their actual size, so to see a realistic representation of the pages required zooming in to 130%. The second surprise was in how each program displays a page at “100%” size. Quark’s advantage in this area is especially valuable when working with Chinese characters, which require more attention than the English characters I’m more familiar with. QuarkXPress displays text much more clearly than InDesign does. My first disappointment wasn’t the fault of Q2ID: it was the difference in text clarity (and therefore production efficiency for my eyes). The results were as good as I could have hoped for: So, we turned to Markzware’s time-tested plug-in for converting QuarkXPress documents to InDesign, Q2ID. (A decade earlier, we used QuarkXPress to produce his award-winning clinical desk reference Chinese Herbal Patent Medicines.)īecause Adobe recently beefed up the EPUB features in InDesign, we thought it would be smart to “future proof” the new book by converting it to InDesign CC 2014.

Earlier this year, I assisted in the production of Essential Chinese Formulas, a book of Chinese herbal medicines. We used QuarkXPress 10 because of its robust support for East Asian languages, and the author’s previous familiarity with QuarkXPress.

Q2id indesign cc