Hi. David Dilling from Markzware and today, we're going to have a quick, little tip on how
FlightCheck can help in
various situations.
In this case, we have a customer who has a whole bunch of
what they thought were
Quark catalog files,
but they don't open for them anymore and they're not sure,
you know, they're not really sure what they are.
Their ultimate goal
is to use our Q2ID
and convert their Quark files into InDesign;
however, they first need to ascertain exactly what
are these old files.
They believe they're Quark,
but they have a .dat extension,
and they're not opening for them, in any of their versions of Quark.
Help! Well, let's see what FlightCheck tells us.
FileInfo.com tells us that a
.dat file extension is a generic data file
created by a specific application and it lists several different applications
that can create these files and there are many more.
The customer, the other alarm bell, so claimed
they were quite sure that these were
Quark files,
but it just wasn't opening for them.
And indeed, when you look at the file, it has as a .dat,
and, in this case, it grabs the clearly...
but it's not Quark,
and clearly,
when you double-click this,
it doesn't know what to do.
Alright, so let's see what FlightCheck tells us.
Alright, so let's drop the .dat file on our
FlightCheck icon in our Dock on this Macintosh.
We see FlightCheck
scans the entire file
from head to toe:
colors, fonts, images, trapping,
overlapping,
pretty much, you name it,
FlightCheck is looking into it.
And we get the FlightCheck Results.
We quickly see that this appears to be a file
of DTP nature
and we look
more closely
at the Overview window.
We see under the File Info,
this is indeed a QuarkXPress file
version 7.31.
So, right away we know
that
this is a Quark file and the .dat extension
was done in error.
We can even get more information on
images used
and even see a preview of the image, even find the image if we're we're
on a local machine. We can see location where it was last used
and different pre-flight details.
So, then, of course, you know, we see fonts, all information on fonts. We get
all information on colors,
as you can see here on
Supporting.
You can see if I move it up a bit
that there were some custom extensions used,
including drop shadow, custom bleeds and table,
and this is the table extensions, probably where the .dat files came from.
So. FlightCheck is a great tool.
We'll have a more in-depth video on FlightCheck 6.76 later,
and how you can quickly
set up your Ground Controls
or choose one of the presets
to check for various things before you go print
or before you create an internet advertisement.
It's that easy!
But here you see how quick FlightCheck can tell us
that .dat file is indeed
not .dat, but a .qxp,
in this case.
Okay?
So, now the last part of this video. Let's see what Markzware's Q2ID will do
with a .dat file?
Will it convert it
into InDesign?
Much like FlightCheck, our conversion technology in Pub2ID, Q2ID, and
ID2Q
relies on looking deep within the file format and not just on
judging the book by its cover and saying, "Hey, it's a .dat.
We can't try to open that file."
We can see what's inside that file without opening it.
So, in this case,
our Q2ID allows us to select the supposed
.dat file, which is actually a Quark file,
and you'll see we can convert
into QuarkXPress
in just a few seconds here.
It's that easy
with Markzware Q2ID and Markzware's technology to look inside your print
files.
Alright, let's have a closer look here at what we have.
And we see indeed that this file is...
was a Quark file now an InDesign file via Q2ID from Markzware.
And we see that our FlightCheck told us about this file. This is a sample from one page of
the catalogue.
And we see here the Bird.eps, which we saw in FlightCheck
and got all the preflight info.
The Markzware technology looks deep into the file
and we've had people send us,
"Yep. This is a PDF. How come it's not outputting?"
when it really was a .indd
or a .jpg
The designer just switched it from
.jpg to .pdf and thought it would be a PDF.
In this case, we see a .dat file that is actually a Quark file
and completely convertible in InDesign
So, don't always believe what the file extension
says.
Don't judge a book by its cover.
Use FlightCheck. Check your file and it will tell you what the file really is.
Not only that, it will pre-flight and let you package all fonts and images, as well.
It'll even package
fonts used within other images used within your InDesign layout.
For instance, in Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.
So, that was the quick tip. I guess it went a little bit longer than just being quick, but I think this is
vital information
for people working with digital files for print
and for exporting for
internet use to understand 100%, without any doubt,
what's inside your file.
Use the quality assurance standard,
Markzware FlightCheck, if you convert your files choose Q2ID for Quark to InDesign,
and ID2Q for InDesign to Quark, and Pub2ID for Publisher to
InDesign
and many many other
services we offer for
converting and fixing your bad files.
This is David for Markzware, signing off, wishing you a Happy Holiday season and
a Merry Christmas,
and, of course, a Happy New Year!