Perhaps you’ve seen the commercials by print giants like Xerox and Hewlett-Packard, in which they espouse how cheap print has become? Indeed, the cost to generate color print these days is, in fact, much less expensive for businesses than it was just a few short years ago.

While printers and the consumables they use have become more accessible to businesses on a budget, there remains an unnecessary hidden cost in print output and electronic publishing—the cost of ill-prepared content.

The origin of content
The amount of content businesses generate these days is mind-blowing. It’s disseminated in any number of ways—in print products such as brochures, marketing and sales collateral, advertisements, educational and training materials, presentations and so on. In combination with their print initiatives, businesses also have “new media” opportunities—creating content for electronic communications, such as the Web, an Intranet, DVDs and CD-ROMs, and e-newsletters—each medium requiring that the content be prepared just a little differently based on its output intention.

David Creamer, owner of I.D.E.A.S. Training, Bonsall, CA, says that there is greater burden on businesses to develop strategies for both print and e-media, and as a result, must understand the nuances of how content should be prepared for each “product.” A document intended for print, for example, must be created in a very different way than content destined for a corporate Intranet.

Fundamentally, content for print and content for electronic distribution, differ in color space. A file bound for the Web should be set up to enable a monitor—which reads color in variations of red, green and blue—to read and reproduce the file. Electronic files should be also be “low resolution,” meaning there are fewer pixels required (and, thus, a smaller file size) to view on a monitor.

Conversely, print is a bit pickier. Most printers read and process in four-colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, “CMYK) and require very-high-resolution graphics and text in order to output crisply.

Clearly, it complicates operations for businesses—dealing with how to take all this content, massage it into a form that’s needed, and then getting it there. When content is not prepared correctly, based on its output intention, there is a cost—sometimes hard, sometimes soft—to “fix” the content.

“Making content” is very much like a manufacturing assembly line. As an automobile is being created, it passes along various production stages, where parts are added until the car is complete. But what happens if the car skips a stage—leaving it without an engine block, for example—and no one notices the error until the car is rolling off the line. There is a cost by the manufacturer to disassemble that car, add the engine, and reassemble it until the car is whole.

Content is no different. Digital files that are incomplete or inappropriately created cost their creator time and money to fix.

“Everyone can make a PDF file on the computer simply by selecting the print-to-PDF option, for example. It does not mean that the file created is a production-quality PDF,” explains Steve Shinnick, vice president of sales for All Systems Integration, an international graphic arts and printing integration firm. In his role, Shinnick consults with businesses across the globe, and suggests and implements technologies that help his clients create, manage and distribute content is the most effective and cost-efficient way.

Fortunately, content creators don’t have to be formally trained graphic artists to prepare good files, suggests Shinnick. There are low-cost software solutions—commonly referred to in the print industry as “preflight” software—that help businesses ensure their content will render appropriately, no matter how it’s disseminated.

A preflight tool like Markzware’s FlightCheck Professional will adjudicate digital files and verify that output specifications are met.

The investment is minimal—just a few hundred dollars for a software solution that promises to save the average business untold amounts of time and money in the recreation of “problematic” digital files.

Evans continues, “I am always coming across these Quark files that won’t open, but need to be converted to InDesign. The solution used to be to either open it in Quark 6 or to recreate it from a hard copy. Neither one of these is a good solution. Opening it in Quark 6 means that down the road I still need to find a way to convert it to InDesign or continue supporting Quark which is no longer our software of choice. And, of course, recreating the document is not an efficient use of time.”

“I have not yet come across an old Quark file that Q2ID wouldn’t open. So, I have been happily converting all those files from Quark to InDesign using Q2ID. And as I come across the files that had been opened in Quark 6, I will be converting those, too.

As the years unfurled behind it, the company evolved and grew beyond the geographical boundaries of North Carolina and its initially narrow Clientele focus. Today, The Moore Creative Company employs a staff of three designers, four developers, and a search engine marketer. Its clients represent a diverse roster of companies that vary in size, as well as industry. And what was once a print-centric workflow now is unevenly split, with 20 percent representing print output, and the 80-percent balance devoted to electronic and online media.

“We transitioned to more Web-site design and interactive Flash [and] animation work online, and later, to more e-mail marketing design,” Ryan Moore recalls “We probably hit the 50-50 split between print and online around 2001 or so, and now we do more jobs that start with electronic items, and that we’re suggesting print items to support or complement them — versus the other way around.”

It was a few years ago when The Moore Creative Company underwent a transition of another kind; it switched layout platforms, from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign. Moore says the revamp of the workflow went quite smoothly, overall, and the design team appreciated the synergies between Adobe InDesign and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite — Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. — they’d already been using.

The only “glitch” in the workflow was so minor it may not even be properly categorized as a “glitch,” and that was how to handle legacy content that needed to be reused or creative content submitted by clients that came in the form of native-application QuarkXPress files. Moore began a quest for a tool that would allow his creative team to reincarnate QuarkXPress files in Adobe InDesign, without having to essentially rebuild the layout, element by element.

It became imperative that he find a solution the day a new client brought in a QuarkXPress file from an older-version of the application. The job was a “rush,” and the creative team needed to extrapolate the content as quickly as possible in order to being working on it in Adobe InDesign.

“Rather than buy the new Quark or look for a friend to open it, we searched the Web and found [Q2id]. Thirty minutes later, we had our file converted and were on our way,” Moore recalls.

Developed by Markzware, Inc., http://www.markzware.com, Q2ID (QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign), is an inexpensive little Adobe plug-in with a self-explanatory name. Simply put, it enables user to open QuarkXPress files with Adobe InDesign, while preserving the elements and formatting, including page positiong, color models, fonts and styles, images, and more. Once installed, converting a file requires just a few familiar clicks: Within Adobe InDesign, users click on File, then Open, and choose teh QuarkXPress document they wish to convert.

“We purchased it either at the end of 2007 or early 2008 for a specific project [for which] we received files from the client — from another designer — that were in QuarkXPress 7,” Moore recalls. “It would have taken hours to rebuild and, instead, it took minutes to convert … It saved the day, and the budget!”

As time goes by, dealing with QuarkXPress-housed content becomes less of a concern for the team at Moore Creative. Ryan Moore estimates that a QuarkXPress file passes through the office approximately once every four months.

“It’s not something we use every day,” he notes, “but when we do need it, it’s been in an emergency rush situation, and Q2ID has saved the day … Zero problems. Exactly as advertised. And worked perfectly the first time,” Moore says of Q2ID. “that was the best part. It was so easy to use. Nothing complicated.”