Right now, hello, everybody. Hi.
David Dilling for Markzware and today, we have one of
our valued customers,
Lori Miskoff from Media Trends LLC, right?
LLC.
Right. Excellent, excellent. And today,
Lori’s going to share with us some
experiences with the Markzware products,
Q2ID Quark to InDesign, in this case.
But before we jump into that, Lori, can you
maybe tell us a little bit about, well,
about, well, first of all, how did you get involved in
graphic design? Well, that's a long story.
My husband started out as a
newspaper reporter and I was working as
a phone company outside plant engineer.
But, in 1982, he decided to start his own
printing company, something he always
wanted to do, and I decided I would join him.
So, we got into the quick print industry,
which was very big at the time.
And because he was a journalist and he
also was teaching at Rutgers part-time,
we picked up a few newspaper customers. So, the
newspapers became a bigger part of our
clientele. And finally, in 1990, we sold the
quick print and we went completely to
pre-press. And we were just doing
layout of school newspapers,
high school and colleges. Mm-hmm.
So, it turned into a pretty big business. At one time, I had about
50 clients and it was …
I had a full-time graphic designer also
working for me, and it was really rolling.
Things have kind of slowed down, since then.
Budgets have changed, you know.
Obviously, some schools have stopped
printing and go online completely, but, yeah,
I still have my clientele. And we
also do websites, now, you know. Yeah.
We’ve moved into that, as well. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Just, you know,
a little bit of a side question.
How do you make your websites? In which
programs? WordPress. WordPress, yeah.
Excellent, yeah, yeah. I long ago figured, “Why
reinvent the wheel?” And it's a good…
it’s a good basic, you know. The framework is great.
It's really based on blog, so
it's really good for news websites, which
is what we handle. So, it's a good product.
Yeah. You know, we use it, as well, a lot.
So, that’s, yeah, very good. And, now, you already
touched on it, but the, yeah, so that, you know,
I guess you already touched on that,
actually, what your company does. So, that, yeah,
we've got two questions in one, there.
Yeah, we consider ourselves a publishing service
and we're, you know, our focus is schools,
high schools and colleges, the newspaper.
So, we do different levels of service.
We can do layout from scratch.
Those students will give us their stories and
their photos. And we'll do the layout.
At other times, the students will do their
own files, either QuarkXPress or
InDesign, sometimes Publisher. Yeah, yeah.
And in the old days, it was Pagemaker, but,
in any case, I would get a semi-completed
or mostly completed file and I'll go
through it. I'll even out columns.
I’ll make sure the pictures are CMYK, if
they're in color, and, you know, make sure
the black pictures are, you know, going to
print well. Right.
So… And, then, I… Sometimes, I also just get PDFs and I work in PDFs, too, you know.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I’ll preflight the PDF and I'll
open up pictures and adjust them and, you
know, get everything ready for print.
And then we broker the printing.
I work with several presses and based on
the number, the quantity, of the paper, the
type of paper that's going out, I, you know,
make a decision, based on what's
best for the customer, as far as which
press I work with. Right, right, yeah. We
get a lot of publisher, as well. Yeah, quite a
few still, Publisher files a lot.
And a lot of them are from, indeed, yearbooks,
schools, that sort of, you know, a
niche of the market. So, it's a big thing, yeah.
Yeah, Publisher. It's kind of a pain in
the neck. I'm not fond of working with
Publisher files, but, you know, you have to
do what they send you. Yeah, yeah, you
know, exactly. What are some of the tools
you use in your workflow? You mentioned
preflighting and other things. Do you, you know, which…
yeah, which are a little bit your
workflow tools?
Well, my, you know, up… and I actually kept
Quark a very a long time. I love
QuarkXPress.
I think it was very just intuitive for someone
like myself. It just worked very
well. And I was just going back and
looking at my files before, you know, this
interview. And I really had some schools
that I kept in QuarkXPress up until 2015.
But, in the mean time, a little earlier,
you know, I saw what was happening with
InDesign. I did not like the first couple
of versions in InDesign, but somewhere
around three, you know, it really started
to take on a good personality. But, by
InDesign 4, I was… I had taken some of
my schools and converted my own personal
files to InDesign files. So, now at this
point, I'm completely InDesign, but…
And, then, of course, the ones that were in
Quark, I can use Q2ID, to make the
change and, of course, I'm in Photoshop,
I'm in Illustrator, and I'm in Acrobat. Right.
So, those are my basic software tools.
So, you’re preflighting with
Acrobat, or PDFs. I am preflighting with Acrobat.
I'm kind of very hands-on. I like to get into… I consider myself very
well-versed in PDF. And I like to get
into the PDF, now that you can. Yeah.
I mean, obviously, when PDFs came out, you couldn't touch them.
No. But now it's great. I mean, I could
go in there and, you know, do practically anything.
So, well, how did you learn about
Q2ID and Markzware? Well, Markzware has
been around for a long time. And we used
to go the Seybold conferences. We had our
quick print. And they always had a, you know, you had a
table, a booth. Yeah.
And we also belonged to the National Association of Quick
Printers and the New Jersey Association of Quick Printers.
And we’d go to those expos, and Markzware was usually there.
Yeah, yeah, okay, excellent. Trade shows. Or, Adobe would have, sometimes,
Adobe, I think, would have free samples. Yeah, yeah, in the early days, yeah.
Right? Yeah, I think I might still have some of those floating around. Some of
the FlightCheck. Yeah. I mean, you had FlightCheck?
You’ve heard of FlightCheck before? Yes. I heard of FlightCheck
a long time ago. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's our
pre-flight tool. You might want to check it out. It also checks PDFs.
But also, more importantly, our focus is
the native file, so the
Quark, or the InDesign, or other file types,
you know. I should definitely take
a look at that, again. Yeah, it's just
drag-and-drop
any file, basically, onto the
FlightCheck icon. Then, just, you know, see
what it tells you. It's really
interesting.
I bet. Yeah. Anyway, okay, so, great. So, that's how
you heard about it. And when did you finally,
you know, what drove you to make
the decision to switch from Quark to
InDesign. You sort of just
touched on it and, then, what?
When I started making the transition from Quark to InDesign, I was doing it
manually, with my own files. But I still
had customers who would send me their
Quark files. And, actually, one of the main
reasons that that gave me the impetus is that my Quark version 9 started
crashing upon opening. Oh.
So (laughs), not helpful. No.
At that point, I went to Q2ID. As soon as it started crashing,
I said, I know a product that's
going to help me. So I got Q2ID and, you
know, started opening up Quark files, like
there was nothing to it. Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's the next question. A little bit, let’s dive into
that. We’ll actually go one step backwards.
I always like to ask this.
How was the installation process, the, you know,
acquisition, installation? I, you know, I
don't really remember. I think that… I guess that’s good.
That’s good. No, that is good, because I think it was just very easy. I just got
it. I downloaded it. I installed it and,
then, it shows up on the menu in my
InDesign. It says Markzware. Yeah.
And you… It says Convert to, you know, Quark file to
InDesign. Click on that. It opens up and
you now have an InDesign file. And you go
from there. It was really easy. Yeah, and
what are some of the… Well, the pros are quite
obvious, I think. You just, you know,
one-click conversion. Are there any… Are
there any cons, or anything you need to
touchup or…? Yes, yeah, definitely
one of the main things I find is that
InDesign has a default leading of 120%.
And being a newspaper layout person,
the default leading is 110%.
We usually do 10 over 11. So, all my Quark
files were set up that way and most my
InDesign files, I already have set up
that way. But, when I open Q2ID, I can
already immediately tell that it's 10
over 12. But, because I've done everything
in style sheets, I can just go into body
copy, make one change, you know, in the
Quark justification window…
Not Quark. I’m sorry. The InDesign justification window.
and change it from 120 to 110 and then, everything goes back.
And that clears up a lot of stuff.
Fonts, if the name is different. Like, I was
checking an old file just the other day, to see.
Helvetica used to be
Helvetica Bold Condensed, but now, when I
open it up, it's looking for Helvetica
Condensed Bold. So, all the Bold Condensed
would come up with the pink highlighting…
Yeah. … in the new InDesign file.
So, again, it's just a matter of going into the
font area and, you know, changing, you know,
those particular fonts that are
showing as not available. Right.
But, you know, or any fonts that I may have used on an
old computer that I don't have anymore,
obviously, would have to be updated.
Other than that, it seems to work very
smoothly. I mean in an older version,
sometimes the pictures wouldn't
come in. They’d come in as just sort of
gray with the x. Mm-hmm. Gray preview.
And you wouldn’t see the picture. But, recently, that
hasn't happened. So, it’s… Yeah. Hey, well, you know
that we do have some bugs
here and there, you know. It's a
constant struggle, because the Quark and
InDesign they're always, you know,
adding new versions, and OS is changing,
and, so, if you find any oddities, please
do report them to Markzware, (I’ll put a
link here to the support form.) because we
want to hear that, because, generally, we
can fix it, you know.
Yeah. And also the leading, that
leading problem, we should check into
that, as well. But, in any event, like you
said, hopefully, it's just a small change,
in most cases, and, you know. It's fine and it’s
maybe… So, it's really and, then, it's
an InDesign file, at that point.
I save it and I'm ready to go. Yeah, so, I guess, you know,
would you recommend
Q2ID to other people considering buying
it or switching? Definitely, definitely.
I mean, I have Quark files
that are 20 years old, at least, that
I can still access.
I have old ones probably, but… Yeah.
And I just tested them the other day with Q2ID, and they came up beautifully.
Right. So, if you have an archive of
Quark files, it's a really good way to change it to InDesign.
Right. Very quickly.
Right. It converts everything, you know,
like you said. Exactly. Colors, fonts, images, styles.
Boom, right on in. Yeah, it's just really very
seamless and, you know, you don't even…
I mean, you're using this one command, but
you're opening up a file, and it opens
up as an InDesign file. So, you’re never
really seeing Quark and, you know, you just
go from there. Yeah, right. Good.
That’s a good point.
You don't even need Quark on your system,
to convert these old, or even new, Quark files.
You just need the Markzware plugin loaded in
InDesign and it’s, like you describe …
Exactly. … very easy. Yeah, yeah.
Well, Q2ID is just so simple to use. You know, the
fact that you can open a Quark file and
it immediately becomes an InDesign file, and
then you go from there is what
makes it work so well. It’s because that is
what we strive to do, over the years, to
provide to the customers, really, a
one-click conversion. Like you said, a
couple of oddities here and there
you have to check out, but excellent.
That's the idea. There's three reasons
that I would use Q2ID. One is if your
Quark program is crashing, which happened
in my case, and I couldn't even open a
Quark file. Another is if clients are
sending you Quark files, and you want to
put them in InDesign. And the other is if
you have an archive of old Quark files
and you need to update them to InDesign.
Yeah. It works. It works every way.
Yeah. Excellent! Very good, very good. Those are
the three main reasons, exactly.
Very, very well said. Okay, alright.
Lori, well, thank you very much for your time.
You’re welcome. We really appreciate it.
Where can people find more information about your
company in New Jersey?
Okay, well, our website is MediaTrends.org
and people can also email me at Lori, that’s L-O-R-I,
lori@mediatrends.org.
Excellent. Well, once again, really, thank you
for the time, for sharing your
experiences with Markzware's Q2ID and we
wish you all the best for, you know,
for your husband, yourself, and your business.
Oh, thank you very much.
You’re welcome. Nice to talk to you.
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