On May 10, 2013, at 9:15 AM, Manuel Schmalstieg wrote: > In the case of the company MarkzWare, who produces third-party > Quark-to-InDesign and InDesign-to-Quark converter plugins, what I heard > from some Quark senior official was that "technically, it's illegal" - so > apparently, they built their converter by reverse-engineering the > undocumented Quark file format. Quark didn't provide a specification to > them, and no fee is being charged. > > Quark didn't like the situation, but they didn't take any action. I don't > know how it works on the Adobe side.
Reverse engineering by a team which has never been exposed to the details has been legal since Compaq won against IBM. On the Adobe side, Adobe has documented the .inx and .idml formats, and there has been development towards being able to process the latter (the former is older, deprecated and apparently represents technical hurdles not worth jumping). Opening .idml should be quite workable --- I see little gain in complicating things w/ unnecessarily reverse engineering a format which has a documented equivalent. William -- William Adams senior graphic designer Fry Communications Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
