Hi, everybody! David Dilling for Markzware, here. And, today,
we’re going to have a talk with Laurie Ruhlin
and, here, I have her webpage up.
Laurie is an Adobe Certified Trainer,
an InDesign expert.
Well, we’ll let Laurie tell it. Here, let’s pull up the Skype.
And, before we do that, she’s going to tell us about her experience.
Amongst the background of what Laurie does, on using
QXPMarkz, a new product from Markzware, to preview,
export and convert QuarkXPress documents.
So, here is Laurie. Hi, Laurie!
Hi, there! It’s good to talk to you!
Yeah. It was not too long ago, we saw each other at the
CreativePro Week. Right, right. And we just had…
So, I’ve been a speaker at CreativePro,
for the last couple of years. And this last year was interesting,
because we did it all online! Yeah.
And an interesting experience, but I’m telling you,
it was fabulous! I mean, I prepared a couple different
sessions. And I watched, for four straight days,
everybody’s sessions that I could. And I’ve actually,
now, gone back to listen. It was just really, really good.
And even though I’ve taught these programs, for years,
I feel I still learn something new.
Here’s a new nugget or a new bit of information.
I’m always learning something new from everybody.
Oh, yeah. It’s great. It’s great!
Yeah, I really enjoyed all the sessions,
but your sessions, as well, actually. Interactive documents,
and I was talking about how to export to PDFs and ePUBs, and
Publish Online, and Ajar Productions in5,
and just kind of getting all that animation and that learning how to
make some of that stuff, starting from scratch.
It’s cool. It’s fun. Oh, always.
And I did another one on Styles, and Paragraph Styles, …
Yeah, InDesign Styles, yeah. … and InDesign Styles.
Yeah, it was good. I’ve been teaching InDesign
for… since it came out. I started working with InDesign,
in 1998, 1999, right when it came out.
And, at the time, I was actually teaching QuarkXPress.
And, so, I worked for a printshop, for a couple years.
And, then, I answered an ad in the newspaper, and they needed a
QuarkXPress teacher. I was like, “I can do that!”
And, from there, I have been teaching almost 25 years, now,
And, for a long time, I taught a class called,
“InDesign for Quark Users.” Whoa!
And, so, I was able to show them, “Well, here’s how you do this in
Quark, and here’s how we’ll do that, in InDesign.”
And, so, I was able to pair the two programs, together.
And I taught that, probably every month, for about five or six years.
Wow! And, so, I was very well-versed in
Quark and I have to say I haven’t opened it up, in years.
I don’t even have it, on my computer.
I always thought, “Oh, I’ll never not use Quark QuarkXPress.
And, so, here I am, needing your product, which is funny.
Yeah. Let’s, now, switch over to the Markzware side. So, how did you
first… When did you first hear about it?
Do you remember the first time you heard about Markzware, or how did you…?
You know, I have been talking about Markzware, in my classes, for years,…
Yeah. …especially in the “InDesign for
Quark Users” classes. Everyone would say, for the longest time, there was
this little button that said, “Oh, open up your QuarkXPress file.”
And what was that? Version 4 or 5, that they stopped that CS?
Yeah. Yeah. When did they stop that?
Do you know? From InDesign, you mean?
Yeah, like Quark 5, I think, … Yeah.
… was still available. Yeah.
Quark 5, Quark 6. It was a long time ago.
Yeah, it was a while back, anyway. Yeah.
Yeah. And, so, at that time, everyone was like, well,
“Wait a minute! I, now, still have all these Quark files.”
And, so, for the longest time, I was recommending, “Oh, well,
you have to go buy this plugin.” And I’d pull up the website and
I would show it, in class. And I would probably show it,
in probably every other class… Yeah.
… that I would teach. And, so, I have been well aware of the
program and the need. Believe it or not, I never had to use it,
up until recently. And, so, a lot of my clients, they either had it,
in their offices and they would have already converted it and sent me the
file, which was great, but I have recommended it, for years, basically.
Right. Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. And let’s, just to make note,
before we switch to the next part of the interview, is that
Q2ID is being replaced and slowly phased out, by
QXPMarkz, our new product, which is a stand-alone application,
unlike Q2ID, which is a plugin to InDesign, for
Mac and Windows. And, at this stage, QXPMarkz is only for Mac.
And we’re still working on the Windows version, which is
why we’re still, of course, keeping Q2ID, for those customers that
need the conversion from QuarkXPress to InDesign,
of which there are still a lot out there, but there are a lot
of customers… Surprisingly.
Yeah. Actually, yeah, surprisingly. And a lot!
And, well, it was interesting, with Laurie, because that happens
with a lot of customers, as well. All of a sudden, they come across
a batch of QuarkXPress files that they, all of a sudden, need to
get access to, and they don’t have Q2ID, anymore. They need to get it,
or, in this case, Laurie got the new product from Markzware, the
QXPMarkz. So, … Right.
Yeah, maybe you can tell us how that was, setting it up and using it, the
first time. How did it go? Yeah, well, a little bit of the
backstory. My father was writing… He has written a book, over the last
few years, just about his life. And he was a history teacher, so he
was really adamant about making sure that his grandkids knew about his
life and growing up on the farm, in a small town in Iowa.
Wow! And, so, years and years ago,
probably in early 2000’s, late ’99, ’90-something, I said,
“Oh, Dad, let me put that into a book, for you.” And, of course,
I used Quark, at the time. Yeah.
And, so, for the longest time, it was in Quark. And he printed it out
8-1/2 x 11 and spiral-bound it. So, fast forward, to present day,
I said, “Well, let’s turn this into an actual book.” I had a
book project, an eBook project, for a project that I was hired to do.
And, so, I said, “Hey, I’ve done this, once. Let me do it, again.”
And, so, I transferred all of his text. Now, I did have his text already in
Word, because, over the years, I had already transferred it.
And, so, I put it into InDesign. So, then, I started looking through
some old files and I found a piece of paper, a stapled chunk of paper,
and it was written by his brother, who has since passed.
And I said, “Where is this document?”
And he was like, “I have no idea.” So, we contacted my cousins, and
they sent me five documents that were QuarkXPress files.
And she said, “I don’t know what these are. Do you have the
ability to convert them?” And I said, “Yes, I do and I know the
exact person to purchase the product from.” And, so, I did.
And you helped me figure out which product that I needed.
And, I’m telling you, within about five or six minutes, I had all
these files converted and ready to go, and I’m now working on putting
those into InDesign. Wow! Awesome.
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah.
And you, I mean, when you first used QXPMarkz, you’d get a preview,
with a little file info. How did you like that? Was it handy?
I did, because I had, when I opened up the file, I had
family_history_1, 2, and 3, and I had family_history_beginning,
and, then, I had intro. And I don’t know what he was doing, with this.
(both laugh) And, so, I was able to click on
them and see, that “Oh, this one’s the cover and I don’t have any of
those pictures, anyway, with one document, or one page.
It was just the pictures. And I didn’t have them, anyway,
because it… And what’s kind of cool, as I noticed,
on the side, when I clicked on the image of the document I was trying
to open up, it told me it was one page, it told me how many colors,
it told me how many images were in this. And, so, I knew which one I
needed to open up, which is really nice.
Right. And, so, I found the one that was,
like, twenty pages long, and I was able to open that one up, and
I’m not in Affinity Publisher, yet, but I noticed, at the top, that I
could do both InDesign and Illustrator and there’s an
Acrobat, isn’t there? Also. Yeah, mm-hmm.
Yeah, so, that’s really cool. So, if I didn’t have any of these
InDesign that I needed, and I just simply needed to send a PDF,
to somebody, to say, “Hey, is this the file that you’re looking for?”
Right. I was like, “Oh, that’s perfect
that I could just export it, as a
PDF, and not have to worry about it.”
Right. Well, it’s just some… So, yeah. It really is pretty neat.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty neat. Or, for like the PDF, if just
like someone, maybe, they just want to see what was in the
document, just get the text, and just make a PDF.
They don’t have Quark or InDesign. They just need to
get the content. You can just send them a PDF of that
Quark document, just like that, … Right.
… which is pretty neat. And that’s what’s kind of cool,
to be able to figure out which document I needed, and if I
needed to go through the conversion and, you know,
for those people who don’t even have InDesign, you can still
use it, you know. The top tier of that, you know, the Art Director
or something, can still use this product and say, “Hey, this is
the file that I want,” send it to the people that are working on it.
And they don’t even need to have InDesign, which I thought is
really cool! So, … Right. Yeah, yeah. That’s neat.
Great! Great to hear. Well, thank you. So, I guess,
would you recommend to people, if they need to free their
QuarkXPress documents, to something else,
would you recommend QXPMarkz? Yeah! Absolutely, because,
if I didn’t have the ability to figure out how to
export this Quark file, I wouldn’t be able to add it to
the book that my dad’s writing, but I wouldn’t be able to,
honestly, to have his information that he wrote,
probably 18 years ago. He was a
printer, in a very small town in Iowa.
Wow! And he used QuarkXPress.
And, so, if I didn’t have this product, I wouldn’t be able to
have the history that he had written down for his grandkids
and we did have one printout, but that was all we had.
And, so, absolutely, I would recommend it!
Now, you can… What I found was really cool is that it kept
a lot of the inline graphics. It kept some of the page numbering.
Now, I found out that my uncle didn’t know how to use page
numbering, in Quark (both laugh), but what else I …
Hey, he’s a printer! Yeah, he was. He was a printer.
He got it done. So, I knew it wasn’t my document that I had
created, it was his, just because there were a couple of little
nuances that I wouldn’t do in it, but what I noticed was that the
page structure was the same, the inline or the anchored graphics
were still there, and I still had some of the… a lot of the formatting.
He didn’t use Paragraph Styles, (David laughs) but that’s his
problem, not mine. (David laughs) But I found that a lot of that
stuff was still there, which was really nice, so that I could
still keep the integrity of the original Quark document.
Yeah. And convert it. And I’ll probably end up…
Yeah, I’ll probably end up copying and pasting a lot of the
text into InDesign. But what was nice is that I was able to see
his original intent. Right.
And I wouldn’t be able to do that, if it was just was copying the text
with OCR and I’d have to read… Oh, yeah.
… read every text. Yeah.
That would have been a nightmare. So, I’m so glad that I had this
opportunity to get these files into a format that I could read.
And, now, we can incorporate it, into a book, and it was painless,
I’ve got to say, which was nice! Fantastic! Wow! That’s great to
hear! That’s interesting, as well, that your uncle, I guess, was in
the printing business. Yeah.
And you, sort of, followed in his footsteps, to a certain degree.
Yeah. And we… I remember back,
he passed about ten years ago, and he was, in my high school ages,
I think, he was in this printing. And I remember going and talking to
him, a little bit, about Quark. And I actually taught him,
a little bit, about Quark. Wow!
Then, I started teaching it. And, so, we would go out, in a
small, little town in Iowa, and I remember sitting with him
and showing him a few things. Awesome!
And, so, yeah, very cool. That’s neat! Yeah. Very cool.
Very cool. Yeah, very interesting. Well, thank you very much, Laurie.
One thing I want to mention, before we go, is I love this. Oh,
where was that quote? Right here.
You can’t see, I don’t think, but I’m on your web page.
Okay. It says, “Teaching makes me a
better designer, and designing makes me a better teacher.”
I thought that was such a great… And I’ll skip back to Skype, here,
first. Get you back up. That’s such a great quote, Laurie.
I mean, I guess, yeah. It’s true, because you always say
the better way to learn a product is to teach it, or to learn a skill,
is to actually teach it. And, so, in my teaching, I say to do
certain things but, then, I have to put those into play, when I’m
actually doing the projects. And, so, one of the… To get back to
CreativePro Week, … Yeah.
… I watched a session that said, “You have to do these specific
things,” and I said, “I should be
doing those.” And I went back to one of my documents and I
completely changed some things and used the tasks and the ideas that I
should be… that everybody should be using, in these documents.
Yep. And I just, kind of, need a,
kind of, a kick in the pants, in order to do it correctly, I guess.
Yeah. Well, that was neat, with CreativePro, as well, is I saw
a lot of the presenters, like yourself and Mike Rankin and all
these other people. They were active, in the Chat sessions,
in other people’s presentations, also learning.
Right. And Russ… I forget Russ’s last name…
on the long documents? Russell Viers. Russ has a
document… I went back and I sat there, for four hours,
in my house, at night, after I watched his presentation, and I
worked on my current document that I’m working on, and I
employed some of the things that he talked about.
Yeah. Because, like, I’d see him doing
these things. And I went back and I did it. And, so, …
Yeah. Oh, and, then, I was going to tell
you, I wrote a blog post… Oh, yeah.
… on the experience I had, at this online CreativePro conference.
And I had written one, last year, at the live conference, talking
about the food, you know, (David laughs) and the interaction of people.
This one was so much different. So, I decided to write another blog post on
it, so, I’ll do that. I’ll put that, up here, and I’ll
link to it, in the description. Yeah. Okay, great.
Yeah, cool. Great.
I’ll check that out. Well, Laurie, thank you so much, for your time.
You’re welcome. It was fun to really, actually, have a need for the
product that I’ve been talking about, for years.
And, yeah, I’ll let you know when my dad’s book is finished.
Yeah, please do. And, if you ever find any more Quark documents,
you’ll know where to go, right? I definitely will.
I definitely will, yeah. Thanks. Alright. Well, hey, take care!