I'll start this off with an InDesign Easter Egg.

Select "About InDesign..." in the InDesign menu and type the word "bounce" (without the quotes) to display an Adobe InDesign CS Easter Egg.

There you go, I know you'll all sleep better knowing you can do this now.

According to David Blatner, a notable author of many books about Adobe products, Adobe gave a sneak peek of what they would only refer to as a "future version" of InDesign CS at the Partners in Publishing seminar in New York. In an unprepared and unscheduled demonstration of "future technology," attendees witnessed the following:

• The ability to turn on and off Photoshop layers and and layer comps from within InDesign.
• A new, powerful Microsoft Word import filter that let you map Word styles to InDesign styles
• Anchoring objects to text, but placing them outside the text frame
• An Apply Next Style feature that lets you quickly apply a series of paragraph styles to a whole story with one click

These are some VERY exciting features, some of which I hadn't even thought of how useful they would be. Having a photo anchored to some text without actually being inside the text box is particularly interesting, if true.

In any case, it is widely rumored that both Quark & InDesign will be releasing new versions of their DTP products this year, and many pros believe (myself included) that unless Quark can release something of staggering proportions, the war will be over, and Adobe will have declared victory. You won't notice it right away, but it will be the case.

If you need proof that Adobe is winning the battle, take note that among the advertising & publishing heavyweights that have made the switch are:

Bernstein-Rein Advertising, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, GSD&M, The Integer Group, Landor Associates, R&R Partners, Publicis West, Schadler Kramer Group, DDB Worldwide, and Wunderman. Oh yeah, Oglivy & Mather's entire company, 312 offices worldwide, have also switched over to InDesign CS early in 2004.

As anyone who has visited for the last month or so has probably figured out, I try to post tips regarding Adobe InDesign as often as possible, and rarely even mention the "Q" word.

The reasons are simple. First off, Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign are both tools for designers/artists. As with anything, there is always a learning curve. However, Quark has been around for many years, and to be blunt, the application hasn't changed much since version 3 (about 10 years). Quark has added web export features, but I'm fairly certain that print designers, Quark's main target market, have no interest in using these tools. Other than that, there is nothing new to say about it.

On the other side of the coin, InDesign is still in its infancy, even though I believe the tools ID offers are much richer and more useful than Quark's offerings. There are a lot of features built into ID, and many are "hidden features" that aren't obvious when browsing through menus and palettes.

Until recently, Adobe InDesign hasn't gathered the market share it deserves. But sometime early this year, major publishing houses and advertising agencies finally made the plunge. Many of these stories can be found on Adobe's web site or in trade pubs. The one underlying theme in all of them is "we'll never go back."

I don't mean to get into a feature vs. feature argument with anyone, but I believe that InDesign is the future of desktop publishing. And while I believe Quark is still just as good of a tool as it has always been, it's just not moving into the future the way Adobe is with InDesign. I also believe that Quark's days are numbered, much the same way Pagemaker's days were numbered when Quark 3 was released... it took several years, but eventually, Pagemaker just died a quiet death in the publishing industry.

In conclusion, if you have a specific topic you would like covered when using Quark, please feel free to mention it in the forums and we will see how we can help. But don't feel like we are purposely ignoring Quark, it's just that I believe that there really isn't much to tell you about Quark that you can't figure out in 5 minutes looking through the menus & palettes.

Someone in a forum I visit asked why he gets incorrect color when converting from Pantone to CMYK in Quark XPress. While I do not have the answer (though I have a guess or two), I do have a solution. It's not the most elegant solution, but it works.

Step 1:
Create a Pantone color in Quark Xpress. For this tip, I chose Pantone 542. (See diagram at right)

Step 2:
Using the Model drop down menu, change the color model to LAB and write down the 3 values (percentage numbers) you are presented with. Do not hit the OK button.

Step 3:
Using the Model drop down menu again, change the color model to CMYK. You should notice a pretty drastic color shift, though it varies by color. Hit the OK button. (See diagram at right)

Step 4:
Re-open the Pantone color you just converted again. It should look like the diagram at right.

Step 5:
Change the color Model back to LAB with the Model drop down menu. You should notice that the LAB numbers have changed. Take the LAB numbers your wrote down earlier in Step 2 and re-enter them exactly the same. The "new" color sample should now look like the original Pantone Color, and the "Original" sample is what the direct CMYK conversion would have been. (See diagram at right)

Step 6:
All that's left is to change the color Model drop down menu back to CMYK and un-check the Spot Color radio button. (See diagram at right)

That's it. Your newly converted Pantone to CMYK color should be much more accurate. As an example, I created 3 colors for the diagram below. The first was the original Pantone 542 color with no adjustments at all. The second is the same Pantone Color, but I simply changed the color MODEl to CMYK directly. The third is my "fixed" color conversion. Though it isn't 100% perfect, it's probably 98% perfect, and the other 2% wouldn't show up on a press anyway due to ink gain.

If you still haven't experienced the joys of Adobe InDesign, and you frequently find yourself swearing at Quark XPress for providing you with a perfectly useless preview image of your placed Photoshop EPS file (duotone files require the use of EPS), then this is for you!

When saving your your image in Photoshop as an EPS, give the file a name and hit OK. In the dialog box that comes up, click the first drop-down menu and select Macintosh (JPEG).

That's it. Now, when you place your EPS file in Quark, it should look crystal clear, just like it does in Photoshop, rather than the pixelated mess you normally get with default 8bit preview. You could of course use a TIF preview, but the JPEG preview will be much smaller in size, so your screen redraw rate will be faster.