Expert: Candice Anderson - 7/23/2007

Question
Like so many others, I really hate to ask what may turn out to be an elementary question, but my subject line says it all: Is there any way at all to move elements from my Quark library to my InDesign library? I'm completely at a loss. I work at a newspaper, so the "elements" are pieces of text, or photos, or both, that I use on a weekly (or frequent) basis. And yeah, I'm hoping I don't have to recreate all of them in InDesign because there are several. Thanks much!

Answer
not an elemetary question :)

well, yes there is a way, but you might still have to put some work into it.

I'm taking it that you are permanatly switching over to Indesign, yes?

You should be able to just open the quark file in Indesign, Indesign will ask you where everything is and you will find it, just once. Once this is done, you should be ok. I would then go to file, package. This will then package every file in the document.

The catch is that you may need to rearange things. Sometimes Indesign likes to move the elements you have around.

If the file doesn't open in Indesign from Quark, which could happen, the only thing you really can do is save your Quark file as an .eps, open it in Illustrator (which will carry the files over) and take the elements and relayout your file in Indesign.

So, long story short - no it's not hard to get all of your files into Indesign, the layout is going to the annoyance.