By Tom Ballard
Software Standards
Frequently in technical communication circles, we hear about the “industry standard” in software. For many of us, the “standard” is Adobe FrameMaker or MadCap Flare. For others, it’s Adobe InDesign. For yet others, Microsoft Word is the software of choice. Different tasks require different software, and depending on what we need to do, other standards may include Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, DreamWeaver, Muse, or even Flash, to mention a few. And if you do occasional freelance like I do, you may get an unusual request to use something like Microsoft Publisher. Regardless of what our clients or we personally prefer, there tends to be one widely accepted software for most tasks.
But what do we do when an “industry standard” changes as software evolves or new needs arise?
During my time as a technical writer at ICON Health & Fitness, Inc. (based in Logan, UT) in a manuals department, I gained a lot of experience with converting legacy format content. We had created thousands of manuals using QuarkXPress and tens of thousands of line drawings using Macromedia Freehand over the years. Sometime during 2010, our department realized that the industry standard had shifted to Adobe InDesign and Illustrator for doing the type of work we did. We had Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) installed on all of our computers, but because all of our files were still in Quark format and we still had pressing deadlines, we continued working in Quark for several more months. Finally, during our “slow season,” we realized we needed to come up with a plan to begin the conversion process.
The Problems
Converting tens of thousands of files of legacy format content usually calls for conversion software. Enter Q2ID by Markzware, a software specifically created to convert QuarkXpress documents to Adobe InDesign format. Q2ID does a decent job of converting object frames, text boxes, guides, lines, and even text formatting from Quark to InDesign. However, we quickly discovered that the conversion process is not flawless. Many object styles and formatting options that work well in Quark do not work as well in InDesign. For instance, in Quark all text boxes have a 1 pt. inset spacing, but InDesign allows for no inset spacing. Many elements in our manuals had similar conversion issues, such as changes in alignment, text formatting, and object styles.
InDesign simply had more options that we soon realized we wanted to implement. For instance, we were using square-ended callout lines in Quark, but InDesign allowed us to use rounded ends for a cleaner intersection between two lines at an angle. We had used a spread format with the back cover and front cover on one spread and then each page alternating (40/1, 2/39, 38/3, 4/37) so that we could print the manuals on 11 x 17 paper double-sided. InDesign’s print booklet feature does this automatically, so we decided to change our format to single page so that we could work with pages individually. Quark’s system for creating master styles had been difficult for us to implement, but we found that with InDesign we could create and implement text and object styles more uniformly and efficiently.
Suffice it to say, there were a lot of changes to be made to each manual that we duplicated and worked on. Even though they were in the new InDesign format, there was still a lot of work to be done to get each manual to look the way we wanted in InDesign. We spent months converting each document manually, dragging an overset text box here and applying an object style there, applying text styles to be used in the table of contents (a feature that we started using with InDesign), and applying a master page for automatic page numbering. Eventually we realized we were repeating many tasks with every manual we converted. And where there is repetition in the conversion process, there is room for automation.
Our Solutions
Enter AppleScript. Because we were all using Mac computers, AppleScript worked on each of our machines. We had used AppleScripts in the past for common operating system tasks, such as renaming files. Now we had a challenge that presented an opportunity to create a software-specific AppleScript. We contracted a freelance programmer to write an AppleScript that automated the conversion process from Quark to the point where we had only a few changes to make to our documents after converting them. The AppleScript changed the page layout to single pages, applied the rounded ends to all callout lines, eliminated all 1 pt. inset spacing, applied our master page with automatic page numbering, and relinked all of our images from the Freehand files to the new Illustrator files.
And speaking of Freehand and Illustrator, AppleScript ended up helping us immensely there as well. The process to convert a Freehand graphic to Illustrator format did not require new software, but it did require some work. We had to save each .eps file as a Freehand 9 document, open that new document in Illustrator, and then paste it into an Illustrator template that we had developed where it could be saved as a .ai file. We used the same freelance programmer to write an AppleScript that automated this process as well, which allowed us to simply select all of the images we wanted converted, open the AppleScript, and watch as it would go through this conversion process for each file. The AppleScript still took a while to run, especially with our library of tens of thousands of images; however, we simply let it run overnight a few times. Needless to say, this also saved weeks’ worth of work.
There Is Hope
You may be thinking, “Well, that’s great that you found a solution for your legacy format conversion problems, but my situation is quite different.” While that’s fair, I have seen that there are multiple solutions to many of the problems we encounter with format conversion as communicators. Whether your “standard” is FrameMaker, Flare, Word, DreamWeaver, Muse, WordPress, or something else, there are bound to be solutions for your situation. We initially despaired that we would be using Quark for years even though we owned InDesign, simply due to the time-intensive nature of the conversion process. Now, we are almost strictly using InDesign and Illustrator for all of our projects, and when the occasional request for an old unconverted manual comes up, we can still use Q2ID and our AppleScripts to quickly turn it around.
So even if you’ve been using Publisher for PC and you need to convert to InDesign CC for Mac, there are ways to automate the process. You just need to look carefully, not get discouraged, and perhaps hire a freelancer. But trust me when I tell you, speaking from experience, that automation almost always saves more time and money than you’ll waste copying and pasting every file you own.
Tom Ballard (tballard@iastate.edu) is a PhD student in rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. He earned his MS in English with an emphasis in technical writing at Utah State University while working as a technical writer for nearly four years. He was the editor of Synopsis, the newsletter of Utah State University’s STC Chapter.
