Which versions of each application? Also, is any kind of plug-in being used with Quark to support the Armenian workflow?

I'll double-check but I believe their Quark is 5. The latest it could be is 7. They use a custom Armenian hyphenation plug-in (which works with a variant of the legacy ArmSCII-8 encoding).

They'll be switching to InDesign CS6, essentially because of this:
http://typophile.com/node/94478

hhp

I have had a fair bit of experience dealing with files held in older versions of Quark, up to version 4.11 (at which point content was moved to InDesign CS) including the dreaded Passport version and its unreliable dongles. I have also encountered plug-ins that supported multi-part CJK Postscript fonts, but those were pretty much a lost cause in terms of encoding to encoding conversion.

Earlier versions of InDesign including CS2 (and possibly later) included native support for certain Quark files, including versions 3-4. This was handled in a Mac OS X environment when it still included support for Classic mode (pre 10.5). With more information I would be happy to lend any insight to the process, as it was incredibly frustrating but extremely rewarding when things worked!

A decent converter from Quark files to InDesign is made by Markzware Q2ID

http://markzware.com/q2id/q2id-cs6-windows-released-convert-quarkxpress-...

I only have the CS4 version which does a decent job although sometimes text that is vertically centred in a text box will shift.

You can also set the shortcuts to Quark (Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts) which is a little hit and miss.

Tim

They may want to temporarily hire an experienced InDesign person as a consultant to help out with the first few publications created in InDesign, and to do some one-on-one tutoring, just as a temporary help to their own designer as he learns the application. It's a complicated program and it'll take him a while to get proficient and comfortable with it.

Thanks for all the good advice, and the kind offers of help.

BTW, Adobe MAX 2013 will be in LA in May. That's way too far off for what I have in mind, but just in case: would that be a relevant event here?

hhp

I highly recomend this.
http://www.totaltraining.com/prod/adobe/indesign.asp