Each month Design Tools Monthly reviews some of the best plug-ins and XTensions on the market. Most of the mentioned products can be purchased through The PowerXChange.
- PayPal Wizard for GoLive
Transmit Media has a free PayPal eCommerce Extension for GoLive that provides a wizard to easily create PayPal payment buttons from within GoLive. Download it from www.transmitmedia.com/golive/paypal/
- Symbol Power in Illustrator
Sapphire Innovations’ Symbol Paint vol. 8 ($12) is a plug-in for Illustrator 10 for Mac OS X that lets you paint with Symbols made from text, paths, gradients, patterns, or images. It includes a selection of symbols, and can also be used with the symbols included in Illustrator. Symbols can be automatically sized, twisted, flipped, shifted up and down, and rotated, either regularly or randomly. The result can also be exported to Flash or SVG format. - Multiple Pages in Illustrator
Hot Door MultiPage ($49) fills a longstanding need in Adobe Illustrator: multiple pages. This plug-in for Illustrator 9 lets you create as many pages as you’d like, using Master Pages if desired, and even export multiple-page PDF files.
- Import XPress Tags into InDesign
Late Night Software’s Tag-On ($149) is a plug-in for InDesign that lets you import XPress Tagged text from QuarkXPress. To use it, you export your text from a QuarkXPress document in XPress Tags format, then import it into an InDesign document. Tag-On also supports AppleScript for automation. - Complex Style Sheets
Techno Design’s MultiStyle II ($99) is a plug-in for InDesign, as well as an XTension for QuarkXPress 3, 4 or 5, that lets you define a complex style sheet based on an existing paragraph, then apply it to new text. For example, a large bold product name followed by a smaller italicized description, followed by a price in a different typeface — this could be a style.
- Instamatic & Tape Effects Auto FX’s DreamSuite ($199) is a remarkable image tool that functions either as a Photoshop-compatible plug-in or as a standalone application. It offers eighteen professional-quality effects, including photo borders such as 35mm frames, Instamatic prints, and old-fashioned photo edges, with control over depth and age. Another effect, Tape, lets you add fake strips of several kinds of tape to the edges of your image. See their website for excellent examples. DreamSuite runs natively in Mac OS 9 or X.Auto FX Corp.
- Import 3D Models into Photoshop
Vertigo 3D Dizzy ($49) is a plug-in for Photoshop that imports QuickDraw 3D models, allowing you to change a model’s size, orientation, and position, and apply texture maps and lighting. It includes 500 3DMF models.
- Design Helpers
Gluon’s DesignPack ($199) combines several of their best-selling XTensions: TableMaker, a powerful tool to create tables from tabbed text; ProGrids, which lets you instantly create grids with specified gutters, spacing, guide colors, labels, and measurements; ProGuides, which lets you place a guide in any color, with machine accuracy; and two new items: Flipster, which intelligently flips a layout (usually an ad) from left-facing orientation to right-facing orientation and vice-versa; and iDropper, which lets you pick up colors from anywhere on the screen and add it to the color palette in QuarkXPress. Each item is also available separately. - Create Bar Codes in QuarkXPress, Illustrator or Acrobat
Azalea Software’s UPCTools XTension ($149) lets you create UPC, EAN, Bookland and ISSN barcode symbols directly in QuarkXPress. The barcodes can include human-readable characters, and can be adjusted to compensate for ink spread on the printing press or silk screen. The barcode can be any color, full- or half-height, with a white or transparent background.Yin4Yang’s Barcode Toolbox is a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator 8-10 ($70) and Acrobat 4-5 ($50) that lets you create barcodes in Illustrator and Acrobat documents in these formats: EAN 8, EAN 13, Code 128, UPC/A, UPC/E, UPC/EAN 128, ISBN (Bookland), ISSN, and Marks&Spencer 7B. In addition, Barcode Toolbox can check documents for the presence or lack of a bar code.
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This article was last modified on March 15, 2022
This article was first published on July 2, 2003
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