You have a file with a .qxd on the end — or a file with nothing on the end at all, which is very common — and the machine that could open it retired some time around the second Blair government. Nobody in the building has QuarkXPress. The work inside is a book, a magazine run, a catalogue, a parish newsletter, and it does not exist anywhere else.

This is a solvable problem. It is just badly documented, because the answer changes completely depending on the version. So we will start there.

Step one: find out which version made the file

Everything below hinges on this. The short version of the version question:

  • QuarkXPress 3.1–4.1 — the easiest era to get out. Free tools read these.
  • QuarkXPress 5 — an awkward middle. The document stream is obfuscated, and free tools generally stop here.
  • QuarkXPress 6 and later (usually .qxp, "projects" rather than "documents") — a different container again, and the routes are mostly Quark's own.

The file extension is a weak clue: .qxd was used for documents up to version 5, .qxp from version 6 onwards, and a huge number of Mac-authored files from the 1990s carry no extension whatsoever. The first bytes of the file are a far better guide, and you can check them yourself in about thirty seconds. We wrote that up separately: which version of QuarkXPress made this file?

Before you try anything else: work on a copy. Duplicate the file, put the original somewhere you will not touch, and point every tool below at the duplicate. Some conversion routes write back to the file they open. An original you have not modified is the one thing you can never get back.

Route 1 — LibreOffice Draw (free, and genuinely good for 3.1–4.1)

This is the answer most people never hear, and for a QuarkXPress 3 or 4 document it is often the fastest one. LibreOffice — the free, open-source office suite — has included a QuarkXPress import filter since version 6.0, contributed through the Document Liberation Project. The underlying library is called libqxp.

What it covers, per the project's own documentation: documents and templates created by QuarkXPress 3.1 through 4.1, for both Windows and Mac. On the import side that includes pages and facing pages, groups, rotation, rectangular and oval and Bézier boxes, lines and curves, linked text boxes and text paths, fonts and sizes and alignment, bold and italic, colours with shades, and gradients.

What it does not do, again per the project's own notes: images are not imported, non-English text is not handled, columns are not supported, and neither are non-rectangular corners or custom text-area shapes.

How to do it: install LibreOffice, open LibreOffice Draw, then File → Open and select the file. If Draw will not offer it, choose "QuarkXPress" in the file-type dropdown, or add .qxd to the filename first. From there you can copy the text out, or export the page as PDF or SVG.

This costs nothing. If your archive is QuarkXPress 4 and you mainly want the words and a look at the pages, try this before you consider paying anyone, including us.

Route 2 — an older Adobe InDesign (free if you already own it)

Adobe's own conversion documentation covers opening QuarkXPress 3.3 and 4.1x documents and templates, including the multi-language Passport 4.1x variants. You open them the same way as any other file: File → Open, pick the document.

The catch is the InDesign version. The importer shipped up to InDesign CS6; Creative Cloud releases do not open QuarkXPress files at all. So this route works if there is a CS6 or earlier installation still alive somewhere in the studio — and increasingly there is not, because CS6 will not run on current macOS.

Two further honest warnings, both reported repeatedly in Adobe's own community forums. First, a QuarkXPress 5 or 6 file has to be saved back down to version 4 format inside QuarkXPress before InDesign will touch it — which rather defeats the object if you do not have QuarkXPress. Second, opening a Mac-authored Quark file on a Windows copy of InDesign can produce scrambled, unreadable text; if the file was made on a Mac, convert it on a Mac.

Route 3 — Quark's own converters (free, from Quark)

Quark has never abandoned these files, and publishes free conversion paths. There are two, and they are quite different.

On Windows: the QuarkXPress Document Converter

A standalone free download from Quark. Per Quark's current documentation it "only converts legacy QuarkXPress 3.x – 6.x documents to QuarkXPress 9.1", which those files can then be opened from in QuarkXPress 10 and later. It handles single files or whole folders in batch, including subfolders. It is a 64-bit Windows application; check the system requirements Quark publishes alongside the download against the machine you intend to run it on, because that list changes.

Note what this gets you: a converted QuarkXPress file. It is a stepping stone, not an exit. You still need QuarkXPress at the far end to open the result.

On Mac: the Legacy Document Converter palette

Newer QuarkXPress releases carry this inside the application rather than as a separate download. You enable the DocumentConverterUI XTension, open the Legacy Document Converter palette from the Help menu, and convert documents from QuarkXPress 3.1 through 6.x so they open in QuarkXPress 2022 and later.

One thing about this route deserves to be said plainly, because it matters to some archives and not at all to others, and Quark states it openly in the documentation: "files will be uploaded to a U.S.-based server for processing as per the Quark Sub-Processor Policy", and "Once files are converted and downloaded by the user, they will be deleted from the server immediately and permanently." If your material is under embargo, under NDA, or covered by a policy that forbids sending client work off-site, that is a question to answer before you start rather than after. If it is your own back catalogue of parish magazines, it is a non-issue.

Quark's documentation also flags that any web or interactive layouts inside a legacy document are removed on conversion, and that text will reflow once the converted document is opened in a current release.

Route 4 — a text editor or hex viewer (free, crude, occasionally the winner)

QuarkXPress 3 and 4 documents keep a good deal of their text in the clear. Open a copy in a text editor that will not choke on binary — or in a hex viewer — and you will often see recognisable sentences threaded through a lot of noise.

On a Mac, strings yourfile.qxd | less in Terminal does a tidy job of pulling out the printable runs. On Windows, Notepad++ or PowerShell's Format-Hex will show you the same thing.

Be clear-eyed about what this is. You get characters, in roughly the order the file stored them, with no page structure, no paragraph breaks you can trust, and no way to tell an actual sentence from an internal label. Stories can be missed completely. For a single page of copy you need back today, it is unbeatable. For four hundred documents, it is not a method.

Two practical notes if you go this way. Run it with a minimum length — strings -n 6 — to cut most of the noise, and expect font names, colour names and style-sheet names in the output: they are the document telling you what it used, not your copy.

Route 5 — a commercial conversion plug-in for InDesign

There is a long-standing market in InDesign plug-ins that convert QuarkXPress files, of which Markzware's Q2ID is the best known. These generally cover a wider version range than InDesign does natively and work with current InDesign releases. If your goal is to continue working on a layout in InDesign — reissuing a book, refreshing a catalogue — this is a sensible category to look at. Check the publisher's stated version support against your actual files before you buy, because the supported range moves with each release.

Route 6 — a local, read-only recovery tool (what we make)

QuarkXPress Rescue is built for a narrower job than any of the above: getting the layout and the words out of QuarkXPress 3.1–4.1 documents, Mac- or Windows-authored, on your own machine, without the file ever being written to or leaving the computer.

It reads the document read-only and recovers the page layout geometry — text boxes, picture boxes, empty boxes and lines, with their positions and dimensions, box rotation, and the real curve points of Bézier shapes where they decode cleanly — plus the authored text stories placed in those boxes, carrying the font, point size, bold/italic and colour of each run and the paragraph settings the v4-family format table records. Multi-box stories come across as threaded text frames, so text reflows across the linked boxes in InDesign. Pictures stored inside the document are written out as ordinary image files and linked into their picture boxes. It writes plain text, a styled RTF for anyone without InDesign, and a structurally-valid IDML package, which is the format Adobe InDesign uses for interchange, along with the referenced font names and named colour swatches and a recovery report on every run stating what it found. There is no network code and no account.

Supported operating systems: Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), and macOS 10.15 or later as one universal build for Apple silicon and Intel Macs. One purchase covers both — you get each download.

Where it stops, stated plainly. Paragraph settings are decoded for the QuarkXPress 4 family; the version 3 paragraph format table is not decoded, so a 3.1 or 3.3 document gives you its text and geometry without them. Custom colour display names are not decoded. Picture extraction is proven on a Mac-authored (PICT) 4.1 document; the Windows BMP/WMF path is written but has not been demonstrated on a genuine Windows image-bearing file, and any payload that cannot be positively identified is listed as present but not extracted rather than guessed at. QuarkXPress 5 files are identified but their obfuscated document stream is not decoded. QuarkXPress 6 through 2019 .qxp files are identified precisely by version and reported as not recoverable. Exact layout and colour fidelity is something you confirm by opening the IDML in InDesign — it is the human check at the end, not a promise made here.

So which route should you take?

  • One or two QuarkXPress 4 files, and you just want the words. Route 4 (strings) in two minutes, or Route 1 (LibreOffice Draw) in twenty for something readable with the pages intact.
  • A handful of QuarkXPress 3–4 files you want to look at properly. Route 1.
  • You want to keep working on the layout in InDesign. Route 2 if you have CS6, Route 5 if you do not, Route 6 if what you need is the geometry, the styled text and the pictures as a clean IDML starting point.
  • QuarkXPress 5, 6 or later files. Route 3 (Quark's own converters) is the realistic path, with Route 5 as the alternative. Be honest with yourself about the Mac route's server step if your material is confidential.
  • A whole back catalogue you need preserved rather than reworked. Read archiving a QuarkXPress back catalogue before you convert anything.

We would genuinely rather you got your text out with LibreOffice this afternoon and never needed us, than lost it. That is the point of writing this page properly.