Convert a Quark file to MS Word

[rgoodman]

I was wondering if any of you other prepress experts has any painless and accurate methods for converting a Mac Quark file (with linked art) to a Windows Microsoft Word file, and still retaining all it's font formatting and quality art (with the knowledge that the same font might be available in Windows).

Here's the situation:

Client builds a file in Quark 6 (Macintosh). The file basically is a "letter" with logo art (vector), a person's signature (tiff) and text. The salutation, reader's address and text will be variable printing.

Now, usually, we would have no problem using our in house system and such Quark Xtensions as Darwin to do this.

But, due to quantity and the price the job was estimated (and lack of knowledge on the part of the estimator, sales person and production) the job is being farmed out to another company that specializes in mass quantity variable jobs. Unfortunately, they only accept Windows Microsoft Word files. The client is unaware that the job gets farmed out. So, we're stuck here in Prepress having to try and rebuild the job in Word, which so far we've deemed no quick or easy task.

[rob.morgan]

Save the page as an EPS and place that in a Word doc?

Rob

[rgoodman]

Save the page as an EPS and place that in a Word doc?

Rob

I don't think that would work, Rob, since the text needs to be variable. The text needs to be editable type.

[rob.morgan]

I guess I was thinking that the static stuff could come from the Quark file and the variable info could be built as live text in Word.

I don't know of any Quark to Word conversion software.

Cheers,
Rob

[rgoodman]

I tried printing the Quark file to postscript and then refining it into a PDF. Then, Acrobat has a "save as Microsoft Word Document".

But, when I opened the new file in Word all the text re-ragged and the line spacing and breaks did not hold.

[plgalan]

Create PDF from Quark file.
Open in Acrobat and save as Microsoft Word Document.

[rgoodman]

Create PDF from Quark file.
Open in Acrobat and save as Microsoft Word Document.

Alan:

Thank you for responding, but did you not need the previous post? I tried that. True: I got the logo art and all the text, but I still have to go into the Word file and manually adjust all the leading and text flow to match the Quark file.

I was just wondering if anyone knew of any software out there that might do this or a technique that would make the effort less painless.

[robert.hammen]

I was just wondering if anyone knew of any software out there that might do this or a technique that would make the effort less painless.

OK, I know this is an old post, but would there have been any way to use your variable-data software with QuarkXPress and generate a multiple-page PDF that had all of the versions in it, that you could send to the outside vendor? Not sure if you're dealing with something like mail-merge (in which case this would work fine - if you had 1000 names, you'd have a 1000-page PDF), or something more sophisticated, but sending them an already-formatted PDF reduces the likelihood that they'll screw this up, or that you'd lose formatting going from QuarkXPress to MS Word...