Software and file formats
Everything I work in, and everything I can take in or hand back. If you are filling in a vendor questionnaire, this page is the answer to most of it.
Layout and typesetting
Adobe InDesign · QuarkXPress · Adobe FrameMaker · Adobe PageMaker · Microsoft Publisher
The core of the work. This includes the older formats most studios no longer touch: legacy QuarkXPress documents, FrameMaker books with structured content, and PageMaker files that predate the people being asked to open them.
Office documents
Microsoft Word, including VBA macro development · Microsoft PowerPoint · Microsoft Excel · Apple Pages · Apple Keynote · Apple Numbers
Word is where most multilingual volume actually lives, and where most of it breaks. Broken styles, tables that shatter on export, text boxes that will not flow, tracked changes nobody cleared. It is also where my automation work started.
Graphics and design
Adobe Illustrator · Adobe Photoshop · CorelDRAW · Figma · Sketch · Canva
Artwork adaptation, logo redraws for other scripts, and rebuilding illustrations where text has been flattened into the image and has to be removed and reconstructed underneath.
Video and motion
Adobe After Effects · Adobe Premiere Pro
On-screen text replacement, subtitling and SRT work, and rebuilding animated text where no project files survive. See the animated video case study.
E-learning
Adobe Captivate · Articulate Storyline · Articulate Studio
Course localization: on-slide text, quiz items, button and navigation labels, and the layout problems that appear when a translated string no longer fits the control it sits in.
PDF and forms
Adobe Acrobat Pro · Adobe LiveCycle
Fillable and interactive forms with tooltips and export values, accessible and large-print alternate formats, pre-flight and press-ready output, and PDF re-creation when the source file is gone.
Web and technical drawing
Adobe Dreamweaver · AutoCAD
Drawings and technical diagrams carry labels too, and CAD applications are among the worst offenders for complex scripts, because most were never built to shape Arabic or lay out Indic text at all.
Formats I accept and return
Interchange and handoff formats. IDML · INX · MIF · XLIFF · XML · QXP · QXD · SRT · VTT
These are the ones worth naming, because they are what actually decides whether a file can move between us. IDML and INX mean your InDesign files do not have to match my version. MIF means FrameMaker content can be handed over without the book. XLIFF means I fit inside your CAT workflow rather than sitting outside it. QXP and QXD mean an old QuarkXPress document is not the end of the conversation.
Everything else you would expect. INDD · DOCX · PPTX · XLSX · PDF · AI · EPS · SVG · PSD · HTML
Working on both macOS and Windows, which matters more often than it should: font handling and file compatibility still differ between them, and a job that opens cleanly on one can fail on the other.
If you have a file nobody else will touch, that is usually the job I get called for. An old QuarkXPress document, a FrameMaker book, a PDF with no surviving source. Send it over and I will tell you whether it can be done.
