This is just a proof of concept for now BUT I spent today seeing if we could restore pages from GamePro magazine from the original digital layout files. Please enjoy the cognitive dissonance of seeing a 25-year-old piece of paper in digital form. 
We're nowhere near a place where we can automate this...like I said, it's just a proof of concept for now. I had to do a ton of manual tweaking and font replacement to get it here.
So, briefly: These were laid out in Quarkxpress, going as far back as 1993...we believe in version 3.0. You can only purchase the current version of Quarkxpress, which is version...15.0.
You can not open any Quarkxpress documents earlier than 7.0 anymore, they just don't work. Lucky for us there's a tool to convert to old formats!
...which crashes on about half the files, and also breaks a ton of layouts.
...which crashes on about half the files, and also breaks a ton of layouts.
My workflow:
- Open old file in pirated copy of Quark 4.0
- Export as a new 4.0 file
- Use tool to convert 4.0 file to 15.0 file
- Open and edit in legit copy of Quark 15.0
- Open old file in pirated copy of Quark 4.0
- Export as a new 4.0 file
- Use tool to convert 4.0 file to 15.0 file
- Open and edit in legit copy of Quark 15.0
But even that that point, it's not great. From there I had to manually adjust some leaning, define the font colors for every header, resize some boxes that disappeared thanks to a combination of multiple Quark revisions and font replacements...
...and manually crop out the Penn & Teller photo from a source image that, thankfully, was present on the disc
HEY. If anyone is interested in trying this yourself, here are all the original files for this page. If someone can figure out a workflow that actually works maybe we can restore GamePro for real. drive.google.com/file/d/1-r6IfE…
