PrintAction - October 2009

attest to the potential savings of printing locally and picking the job up – something VistaPrint cannot compete with. Any printer using QuarkXPress is invited to become a part of the Quark Promote ecosystem and benefit from increased profile and access to new customers, whether through the internet or in person.

Currently, the Quark Promote application is Windows only and service is limited to the United States, but a Mac version is under development. Quark is scheduling the service to launch in Canada sometime in Q1 2010 and is currently building its network of design and print partners. Printers wishing to participate in the Quark Promote ecosystem must be members of the QuarkAlliance. Information about the Neighbourhood Printing Program is provided on the Promote website ( quarkpro-mote.com).

Markzware is searching

Most printers will recognize the Markzware name from its renowned preflight application, FlightCheck, and its invaluable conversion tools for QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign documents. FlightCheck uses Markzware’s patented Common Reader Architecture (CRA) to peer inside documents in search of imperfections. This same CRA has now been repurposed in a new product called PageZephyr ( pagezephyr.com), which can search for content inside previously inaccessible proprietary file formats from both Adobe and Quark.

The trend of repurposing content for online use has greatly increased the value of legacy files, which can be very time consuming to search, or impossible if you no longer have the legacy-authoring application. As a result, the proprietary content within these files is rarely repurposed and never realizes its potential as a media asset.

Markzware’s Mary Gay Marchese emphasized the irony in this situation: “Most

often, the data has simply been forgotten, due to the inability to easily and inexpensively access, reference, and reuse the content. It’s incredible that, irrespective of so-called open technologies like PDF and XML standards, such an enormous amount of digital content still hasn't been preserved and made available for future access or monetization.”

The PageZephyr application improves productivity and lowers costs by allowing users to search by keyword or phrases and find valuable content in old files. Text searches can be performed in any language, but PageZephyr is not limited to text searches – the application can also search by other attributes such as file size and creation or modification date.

The selected data is then displayed in a storyboard format within PageZephyr and can be edited and then output in RTF or TEXT formatted files. The final version of the application will include a word processor with text formatting capabilities. Interested seekers can download a beta of PageZephyr from the Website.

A chance for growth

Attending my second major graphic arts trade show this year has opened my eyes to certain realities facing our industry: While a large amount of marketing is being done online and newspapers and magazines struggle to compete with the instant access of Web-based media, print seems to be making a slow and painful recovery. Margins are down and the need for efficiency will take a greater role in determining future capital acquisitions as printers adapt to the new print reality.

The long overlooked small and medium businesses, meanwhile, will likely do more to drive the global economic recovery than the big boys. Even in an economic downturn, VistaPrint has proven that that SMB customer is a valuable source of new pages through the press. With Promote, Quark is going in a new and exciting direction that stands to benefit the myriad of small design and print businesses as much as the SMB customers they aim to serve.

With PageZephyr, Markzware has recognized the value of latent content that has lain dormant in many enterprise archives and retooled their business to free this media.