Review: QuarkXPress to InDesign: Face to Face

Task-based switch­er ref­er­ence puts every dif­fer­ence face-to-face

Indispensable switch­er reference.

“Where do I set runaround,” is an oft-heard ques­tion if you spend any time around Quark-to-InDesign switch­ers. “Where are my gra­di­ent tools,” is com­mon­ly uttered by those going the oth­er direc­tion. In Galen Gruman’s new book, QuarkXPress to InDesign: Face to Face, these are just two of over 250 switch­er ques­tions answered in step-by-step, head-to-head tutorials.

Face to Face is a unique and invalu­able book for any­one mak­ing the switch between Quark and InDesign. The entire book is task-specific how-tos—Quark does it this way, InDesign that. With every spread pit­ting the desk­top pub­lish­ing giants against each oth­er, steps to accom­plish a task in QuarkXPress 6.5 on the left, steps to exe­cute the same task in InDesign CS2 on the right, Gruman’s book is lit­er­al­ly QuarkXPress and InDesign, face-to-face.

In addi­tion to walk­ing the read­er through com­mon how to tasks like set­ting bleeds and crops, cre­at­ing style sheets, export­ing Web doc­u­ments, and defin­ing clip­ping paths, Face to Face also deliv­ers oth­er valu­able infor­ma­tion such as a chart com­par­ing the graph­ic file for­mats sup­port­ed for place­ment by both appli­ca­tions, short­cuts to insert spe­cial char­ac­ters like em dash­es and trade­mark sym­bols, and workarounds when fea­tures are not mir­rored between the programs—such as work­ing with the lev­els of a placed image, some­thing that can be accom­plished direct­ly with­in Quark 6.5 but not in InDesign CS2. A sec­tion on InDesign-only tools and charts of key­board short­cuts for both pro­grams round out a desk ref­er­ence indis­pens­able to any switcher.

QuarkXPress to InDesign: Face to Face, by Galen Gruman; pub­lished by Wiley. 404 pages, 2‑color. US$34.99