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.
- Flash Extensions for GoLive CS
Adobe’s new Advanced SWF Authoring extension (free) for GoLive CS lets you embed and deliver Macromedia Flash (SWF) content and automatically route users to alternative or plug-in download pages. Another free extension, SWF Detect, adds advanced authoring options to GoLive’s SWF inspector.
- Watchfire WebXACT for GoLive CS
Adobe’s new GoLive Watchfire WebXACT extension (free) for GoLive CS provides an interface for the Watchfire WebXACT online service (free) used for testing the content of Web pages. The service lets users easily check Web pages for quality, accessibility and privacy issues.
- Print Booklets in InDesign
alap’s InBooklet 3.0 ($100) is a plug-in for InDesign 2 or InDesign CS that lets you print 2-Up Saddle Stitch, 2-Up Perfect Bound, and 2, 3 and 4-Up Consecutive, with control over margins, gaps, bleed, creep, and crossover traps. You can preview spreads and set printers’ marks. New to version 3.0 is the ability to impose multiple documents from an InDesign book and to save settings as an InBooklet style. You may impose documents either directly to a PostScript printer, a PostScript file, or a new InDesign document.
alap (a lowly apprentice production)
Available through: The PowerXChange
- Save InDesign Pages as TIFF
Triple Triangle’s Raster Write ($169) is a plug-in for InDesign 2 that lets you export pages or portions of a page in raster formats such as TIFF, JPEG and GIF, with control over color mode (RGB or CMYK), resolution, and scale. Uniquely, it can export ranges of pages or spreads into one image or multiple images, and can automatically save a raster version of a document whenever the document is saved.
- Intuitive Color Correction
PhotoTune’s 20/20 Color MD ($50) is a color-correction plug-in for Photoshop 7 and above (Mac OS X) that improves upon the already remarkable Metamorphosis feature of Test Strip, formerly from Vivid Details. To use 20/20 Color MD, you look at a series of side-by-side images, each time clicking on the one you think looks best. After you complete this 15-second process, it applies the minimum number of adjustments to make your image look like your final choice. Professionals can use the advanced controls to adjust exposure in half f-stops, and separately balance color in highlights and shadows. You can also save “snapshots” of your adjustments at any point in the process.
- Open QuarkXPress 6 Documents Directly into QuarkXPress 4.1 or 5
You can now open a QuarkXPress 6 document in QuarkXPress 4.1 or 5, if you install Markzware’s MarkzTools 5.5 ($199). This XTension for QuarkXPress 4.1 or 5 lets you use the standard File> Open menu item in QX 4.1 or 5 to open a QX 6 document. If the QX 6 document uses features not available in QX 4.1 or 5 (whichever one you use), then those features will not be included. So, they recommend that you only import QX 6 documents that have one Layout, and multiple Layers are not recommended for importing into QX 4.1.
- Easy XML from QuarkXPress
Easypress Technologies’ Atomik Xport Personal Edition ($995) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4 or 5 that provides one-touch automatic XML export from one or more documents. You can control grouping, mapping of style sheets, etc. A version for QuarkXPress 6 is planned for 2004.
- Automatically Fix Imported Pictures
Gluon’s DocuSlim 3 ($249) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 6 that automatically “fixes” imported images. Designers often import pictures with too high a resolution, or use images in RGB mode instead of CMYK mode, or cropped, rotated and scaled inappropriately in QuarkXPress. DocuSlim uses Photoshop to open the original image, resamples it to an appropriate resolution, switches RGB to CMYK or grayscale, crops it to fit the QuarkXPress picture box (with an optional “bleed”), rotates it correctly, and turns off LZW compression. Then, it reimports the picture into the QuarkXPress picture box at 100% size, unrotated, in its original position. QuarkXPress prints rotated pictures to desktop inkjet printers at 72 dpi, and DocuSlim quickly fixes this problem. It can process a selection, page range, or master pages. The Enhanced Version ($399) adds the ability to change image file formats, create low-res versions of images, apply Photoshop Actions and run AppleScripts. Gluon also has a version for QuarkXPress 4-5.
- Automate Page Layouts in QuarkXPress
CopyFlow Gold ($495) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that automates importing text and pictures into layouts. It can import text styled with XPress Tags and RTF files from Microsoft Word and other text editors. It’s especially suited for book production, display ad layouts, magazine production and database publishing.North American Publishing SystemsThis article courtesy of and copyrighted by Design Tools Monthly. For a free sample of the printed newsletter, email in**@**********ls.com.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on February 4, 2004
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