Preview and convert. I'm David Dilling. And, later, you'll meet
my colleague, Doug Rosen. Welcome to our presentation from
Markzware. We're very thankful to be here at the CreativePro conference,
an online event, this year. We'll be showing you how we can preview and
convert many of the file formats you see, on the screen,
and much more. I won't have much time to go over this slide,
but what I like best about working at Markzware is that they started at,
basically, the dawn of DTP, at the very beginning. The founders,
themselves, who are still at the company, today,
have DTP, printing and publishing in their blood.
Yes, conversion. We do a lot of conversion. We're known for our conversion.
For instance, you will know, of course, probably many of you, Q2ID for Quark to
InDesign; and, of course, FlightCheck, to help you
check files before going to print; PDF to InDesign, with
PDF2DTP, very popular; and our new product, IDMarkz, which Doug
will show you, and you're really going to love seeing this one.
This is very interesting. And our new entire
line of the "Markz" products, which will include, as you see here,
QXPMarkz and PDFMarkz and another little surprise, which we'll get to, later.
We have other products and services. Check out markzware.com, for more
information. So, let's quickly go over this slide.
We're very excited to be here. As such, we're going to give you a discount for
watching this presentation, 20% off our products. And we'll
probably extend it a little bit, after the show, for those watching a little bit
later. But, also, if you go to this link, you can
enter to win a free Markzware product. There'll be
three lucky winners. In total, we'll be giving away $600 worth of software.
Q2ID, many of you know. Q2ID is one of our flagship conversion products.
Nowadays, it still sells excellently and it
converts, with a click, QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign.
If I had a little more time, I'd actually show you a demo. It's really simple and
easy. Anyway, click there. Choose a Quark document, just like
File > Open, basically, and voila! You have a brand new InDesign file, from your
Quark document. Okay, the testimonials, to back it up. Cruise on over to
markzware.com/products/q2id and you'll find the
testimonials. Okay. So, now,
PDF2DTP, Markzware's PDF to Adobe InDesign converter.
Let's throw it over, to Doug. He's going to give you an in-depth
demonstration of this. Doug, over to you.
Thanks, Dave. Let's take a look at Markzware's PDF2DTP plugin for
InDesign, which converts PDF files into InDesign files. Let's say that you
have a job around. You lost the InDesign file or it's
corrupted, but you do have a PDF and, hopefully, a
high-quality one, like a press-quality PDF. You can just
open that up, using PDF2DTP. And, now,
within a matter of a few seconds, you have an
editable InDesign file, created from your PDF file.
So, let's see what's on these pages. If I do a Command-A,
you can see how the text boxes are broken up.
And, if I get down to this page, right here, and I do a Command-A,
you can see that PDF2DTP attempted to thread the text boxes, the best it could,
so, text will flow. Now, let's take a look at what happened, behind the scenes.
When the file was converted, PDF2DTP created a folder. It placed the InDesign
file that it created from the PDF and, then, it extracted out all of the
previews that it could, from that file, and placed them in that folder.
But let's take a closer look at how the settings the
PDF was created with affect what PDF2DTP actually can do.
So, here, I have two PDFs. They're created from the same
InDesign file, but the settings out of InDesign were the smallest file size
and press-quality PDF. So, let's convert the smallest file size one, first.
And the document consists of two images.
This original image is 72 dpi, over here on the left.
This image, over here, that was placed was 300 dpi, then, two tables.
Now, if I go ahead and hide my
lines, here, this looks like a table. But, because it doesn't have the
strokes around the cells, PDF2DTP doesn't know that it's a real
table. So, it looks like one, but it's not going
to behave like one. It grouped the text, the best it could,
but, unfortunately, it's not a true table. So, now, let's go ahead and convert this
file's big brother, where we used press-quality settings, for the same
exact InDesign file, and it looks identical. This one, again, is
not a table. This one, here, actually is a table, in
InDesign. It's a true table.
And the same is true, again, for the smallest file size.
That one is a true table.
But, again, let's take a look at what happened, behind the scenes.
So, PDF2DTP created two folders, one for the smallest file size, one for the
press-quality, and it extracted the images. But look at the
file size. This one is 241k. This one is 609k.
And, for the press-quality PDF, this image is 418k.
But this image happens to be 4.7 megabytes.
So, what that allows you to do is, if you have a nice quality PDF,
but don't have your original InDesign file, you can actually
create a very nice quality InDesign file and it'll link in the
high-res images or some images that are really high quality.
It all depends on the settings that you created the PDF with.
So, this is a really handy feature of Markzware's PDF2DTP
plugin for InDesign that converts PDF files to
InDesign, which allows you to resurrect
files you may not have an original InDesign file for.
And, now, back to Dave. As you saw, PDF2DTP is a fantastic product.
It really is. It's going to get you out of jams, if all you have left is that
PDF and we have the testimonials, to back it up.
Cruise on over to markzware.com, today, to get
more information on this product.
Now, let's get a deep dive into IDMarkz, the new macOS
application from Markzware. By the way, it's also being worked on for Windows.
So, you Windows users, stay tuned. It's really neat. It's the
first product in our new "Markz" line of products, which I'll get to, in a moment.
It allows you to preview, export, and transition your Adobe InDesign files,
without even having InDesign on your machine. And, without further ado,
let's now throw it over to Doug Rosen, to get a deep dive in.
IDMarkz is a standalone program that converts
InDesign or, in this case, we're going to use an InDesign template file
into IDML. And you're probably wondering, "What good is that going to do me?"
Well, if you're working at all with Affinity Publisher,
this might prove to be a pretty handy little tool. Let's see how that might
happen. I'm going to drag the INDT file provided by
InDesign Secrets onto IDMarkz and it
generates previews for each of the pages.
The previews aren't perfect, but they're pretty close and they give you a really
good idea, versus in the Finder. Another feature of
IDMarkz is it provides a Quick Look plugin.
So, if I highlight a file and tap, I can see the bitmap preview that InDesign
writes into the file. You can see this is kind of blurry, here.
If I go up, here, to IDMarkz, I can actually
zoom up on that and that's pretty clear, pretty crisp text. So, now let's see about
getting this into Affinity Publisher. That's one click away. Just click on the
Publisher button, up here, sit back for a few seconds, and that's now
converted that file and opened it up in Affinity
Publisher, so, I can go ahead and make edits. So, if I go up, in here,
just put some garbage text, in there, and do a "Save As,"
we'll put it right next to the original InDesign template.
And we'll go ahead and we'll close that. You can see, here, that the
Affinity Pub file showed up. If I double-click on this,
it opens back up in Pub, with my changes. But that's not where things stop.
Let's delete the... We'll close this out and we're going to
set this up, to do that, automatically, and add in a few other
cool things, as well. So, I'm back in IDMarkz. I'm going to
click on Command-Comma, bring up the Preferences, and in the
Automation tab, on Document > Open,
I'm going to set it up, to export an IDML, a PNG, and GIF. Now, the PNG and the GIF
and PDFs, all of these formats, will generate
PNGs and GIFs, in this case, of each of the pages. For the export path, I'm going
to put it relative to the input, since our input file is the INDT file.
It should wind up, in this folder, on export, always open the IDML in
Publisher. So, I've set that up. Let's close this,
do the same thing we just did, before. Drag that on.
We still get our previews and it fired up Affinity Publisher.
But look what happened, behind the scenes, here.
In addition to opening up, in Publisher, it extracted the IDML, wrote it out to
disk for us, and all of the previews that
IDMarkz generated, for the images in the template file,
those are put in a folder, for you, as well. And you can use those, as
placeholders, when you're building stuff, just to get an idea of what's going on.
It created GIF files of each of the pages
and it created PNG files of each of the pages.
So, that was all, with one click, we did that. Plus, we're also over here, in
Affinity Publisher, and we can go ahead again and make
changes, if we want to. We'll do a "Save As," put that in this
folder, and, again, here is our Affinity Publisher file.
So, if you happen to have a system that you have
Affinity Publisher loaded on, but you don't have InDesign
loaded on it, but you have InDesign files, this is a
great tool for getting your files into Affinity
Publisher. And, now, back to you, David.
Alright, so, that's the first part of the IDMarkz demonstration.
Very, very interesting, isn't it? Don't forget,
20% off and cruise on over to Markzware and get a chance to win it,
but there's more. We're, now, going to show you a brand new feature in
IDMarkz, just introduced into the product.
And I think you're going to find this very interesting. Back to Doug.
Let's take a look at another feature of IDMarkz, which is the ability to
extract text out of an InDesign file or, in this case, an
InDesign template file. So, we'll first open the file
and, then, under the "Export" tab, you can see there's a "Stories" tab. Over here,
we have three choices. Let's start with HTML.
We'll put that at the same level as the file that we're previewing.
We'll do Text, which is just Plain Text.
And, lastly, we will do RTF.
Okay. Let's take a look at how they actually look.
What did IDMarkz put out? So, if we look at the
text file, you can see that it's just Plain Text.
If we look at the RTF file,
you can see it appears that the top is blank,
but you can see the cursor blinking, here. If I do a Command-A,
you can see there is text, there. It just happens to be white.
So, if you're working with this, you might want to change it to some other color.
And, lastly, let's look at the HTML output. And you can see that each of the
stories, or the text boxes, detected by IDMarkz is put into a separate area,
and it tries to honor the colors and the
font sizes. So, that's a quick look at the
Text Export feature of IDMarkz, which allows you to
export text out of an InDesign, or, in this case, an InDesign template, file,
without even having InDesign loaded on your system.
Isn't that neat? You can, now, export the text, in many different
ways and fashions, get your previews, get your file info.
As you see, IDMarkz is really a handy tool to have in your toolbox, as a
graphic designer, prepress publisher, or even someone who
doesn't have InDesign, but needs to view, or even maybe work with,
InDesign files, and really great for those dabbling in an Affinity Publisher or other
applications, who have native InDesign files they want to use,
in those programs which accept IDML as a transition format.
IDMarkz is the first of the Markz line, which we told you earlier.
There is also a QXPMarkz for Quark documents,
and will be PDFMarkz for PDF documents, doing very similar functions, in an
interface, what you just saw, actually pretty much exactly the same.
And we're going to make that into a bundle, called "OmniMarkz". So, you can
get everything in one bundle, in one package, at a reduced price.
Now, this is not something that's going to come out, right away. This will be in the
future. We're just mentioning this now, so you have an idea of a roadmap.
Okay. So, this is the end of our presentation, the closing.
Thank you for your time. I hope it was very interesting. You can
email us on sales@markzware.com,
for more information. Don't forget 20% off, during the time of this
online event, and probably extended a little further, after that.
Cruise on over to that special Promo page, to
enter the chance to win one of these products, for free, for
three lucky winners. We look forward to interacting with you.
So, on behalf of myself, Doug Rosen, and the rest of Markzware, we hope to
see you, as new customers. And, if you're existing customers, we hope to hear from
you soon. Thank you!