Markzware Wants Your Flaky Files
April 2nd, 2008Have any damaged InDesign files laying around? Markzware wants ‘em.
Markzware, developer of the Quark to InDesign conversion plug-in, Q2ID, is enjoying recent publicity for their role in helping a desperate designer recover a toasted InDesign layout, one so damaged that InDesign just couldn’t open it any longer.
As reported by David in an earlier post, the designer found that by converting the InDesign file to a QuarkXPress layout with Markzware’s ID2Q (which worked, somehow), he could then use InDesign to convert the QuarkXPress layout back to a healthy InDesign one, courtesy of Q2ID.
Today, in the middle of a discussion of this same topic on the InDesign listserv, Markzware’s David Dilling (Marketing Director/Europe) posted a public request:
We at Markzware are ‘looking for’ bad InDesign files …
If you have a corrupted InDesign document, please email it to me at david AT markzware.nl (If larger than 10 MB, please email me first for our FTP details.).
This will assist our development team and hopefully ultimately help you as well.
I double-checked with Markzware that they really were seeking to be inundated with corrupted ID files (are there that many out there? I have none, myself) and it’s true. Sounds like they have a new product a-cooking, hmmm?
Please check your attics, basements, and garages for any bad ID files, and send them on to Mr. Dilling per his instructions. As he said, it should ultimately help all of us.
I have been using ID now since v1.5, which I got in the summer of 2000. I simply cannot recall that any ID documents have gone totally bad on me — to the extent that I could not open them. I’ve seen buggy, weird ID files, yes, which I usually fixed by either an INX export/import or by copy-paste into a new, blank document. I’m sure that Bad Things Out There have happened to possibly many ID users, but from my own experience it seems that ID has always been pretty sturdy in this department. So I’m unable to help out Markzware in this respect — thankfully.
Yes, I think this is why they’ve put the word out … they’re hard to come by.
Same as Klaus. Not a single corrupted file since last century (v. 1.0)!
In our office, we’ve had about 3 in the past 15 months. Sadly, we trashed each one as soon as it was corrupted, so we can’ contribute.
I just had my first. Fortunately it’s a small in-house form I made for american express bills. But still, it won’t open. I sent it off. It boggles my mind how many Quark files over the year I had to copy/paste into new docs just to get around the non-ability to save a corrupted file. I remember bragging to my still-using-QXP buddies 6 mos. after I switched to ID how ID has never bombed or corrupted anything.
I hope I will still find some, just happend recently. We get an error 500 when the disk is full. The problem is that ID tries to auto-save, but no disk space is left. And don’t blame me, it’s our graphic designers who deny to learn while our it guys struggle with the new server … ;-D
I’ll agree with Klaus. I don’t think in using InDesign since it’s earliest version, I’ve ever created a file for me that I couldn’t open.
I haven’t had totally corrupted files in years, but just a few days ago something started to happen. An indd file started crashing the app every 5 minutes or so. It is a file with lots of tables and text. No images. If I styled only text, it was OK. If I styled the tables, same thing.
But whenever I tried to style text and then a table within the text, hang and crash!
I resolved the issue by styling the tables first and then save as with a new name. After that I styled the text taking about 16 crashes along the way.
Still got the job done, though.
Anyone else get this?
The problem occurred on both Mac and Windows versions and on three different machines with lots of RAM.
The book has another similar 60-page section. I dread tomorrow, when I have to start working with it.
The Horror, the horror…
-Tommi