Bringing an eps table into Quark

[AussieBloke]

I'm fairly new to Quark - so my problem...

I've been asked to add a table to an existing Quark file. After an hour of searching and finally realizing that my old version does not automatically create tables and that I would have to go through a very laborious job of setting tabs, rules and vertical lines I set about trying a different way.

I have Indesign - that has never been used in anger as it came as part of the design package from Adobe - so I fired this up and in a matter of minutes created the table. As I said I am newish to this but even I found this fairly simple.

So to get this table into the Quark doc (I didn't want to export the whole job into Indesign - printers won't accept at present) I saved the page with the table on it from ID as an eps file. I then brought this into the Quark doc and it seemed to be OK.

My question is that whilst I am OK with the nature of tifs and jpegs, I am not certain how eps files work. I did open the eps in Photoshop but it wanted to rasterize which I was slightly reluctant to do as I have been told that the text will not be as crisp. So...have I made a mistake here? Should what I have done be OK? Is there some other method? And could someone please explain when an eps should be used as opposed to tiffs or jpegs. Many Thanks.

 

[blueark]

I wouldn't bother bringing the eps into Photoshop unless there was a good reason for it. The eps can be brought into Quark directly which will retain the quality of the original. If you really need to edit an eps file (assuming it's not just a rasterized image), you should use something like Illustrator or Freehand.

Tifs and jpegs are made up of pixels. EPS files are (generally) vector based, and are comprised of resolution independent objects. This allows them to be enlarged and reduced with no loss of quality. Rasterizing an eps file turns it into the equivelant of a tif or jpeg, losing the advantages it had.

There are exceptions to this (eg. raster images can be placed in eps files, which means it might not be totally resolution independent), but that's the general idea!