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.
- Math Expressions in InDesign
i.t.i.p.’s InMath 1.3 ($249–$595) is a plug-in for InDesign or InCopy that creates mathematical expressions using your input and InDesign’s Styles palette. You enter text, click on a style, and InMath creates a correct expression using only InDesign’s text-formatting abilities. You can also drag expressions from InDesign into Illustrator.
- Overset Manager for InDesign
SoftCare’s Overset Manager ($99) is a plug-in for InDesign CS that not only counts the number of characters, words or lines in selected text or linked text boxes, but also can calculate how much text would be necessary to fill a text box. It also provides a constantly updating display of how many words are in a text box, so you can write to a predetermined length. It can also create a new text frame for overset text, which deletes itself once the text has been adjusted to eliminate the overset.
- Avoid Image Scaling Mistakes in InDesign
Knowbody’s Scale Alert is a free plug-in for InDesign that warns you when you print, if any imported images are outside a specified minimum and maximum scale. It provides a list of the images, which you can approve or reject.Knowbody
Photoshop- Easily Adjust Color & Enhance Photos
Vivid Details’ 20/20 Color MD ($50) is a plug-in for Photoshop that helps you color-correct your images with amazing ease and quality. Its interface presents a series of side-by-side images, and you click on the one you think looks best. After a few clicks, 20/20 Color MD applies the minimum number of adjustments to make your image look like your final choice.
The more-advanced method is to select the aspect of an image you want to fix (exposure, color, saturation, contrast, highlight, shadow and dynamic range), and then add or subtract increasing amounts to your image. You can save any “version” as a temporary snapshot, to use for comparison if you make additional changes.
We believe everyone who works with digital photos should have this tool.
Vivid Details
- Easily Adjust Color & Enhance Photos
- Photo-to-Watercolor
Fo2PiX’s buZZ.X ($140) is an amazing plug-in for Photoshop CS and other image editing applications that removes detail in an image, letting you convert a photo into an image that looks like it was drawn with watercolor or oils. It can apply an effect across multiple images, to create an artistic or animated video. Their website shows excellent examples. -
Fo2PiX - Better Black & White Images
Fred Miranda’s BW Workflow Pro ($30) is a plug-in for Photoshop 5.5 and newer that provides 8 preset filter selections, 32 duotone presets, 18 tritone presets, 6 quadtone presets, 3 film grain presets and 4 dynamic range presets for manipulating black-and-white images. Preset, Smart Mix and manual mode give you nearly limitless control over the filters. Smart Mix mode also isolates the red, green or blue channel while changing the other two to prevent over- and under-exposing images. Manual mode lets you change all the channels without isolating any of them for interesting over- and under-exposure effects.Fred Miranda - 9,000 Brushes
Abneil Software’s Brushes collection for Photoshop ($30) includes nearly 9,000 brushes for Photoshop 7 and above, including: Pens, Pencils, Crayons, Markers, Fur, Gel, Noise, Paint Splatter and many more. They also have a free sampler set for your evaluation. Available at www.graphicxtras.com.QuarkXPress- Text Calculator
DTP Tools’ Text Count 1.0 ($99) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 and a plug-in for InDesign that counts text and calculates fees based on characters, words, lines, articles or pages. It shows its results in a floating palette, and in a report that fully details all counts and calculations.
DTP Tools (Goldwein Research){/
- Text Calculator
- Import & Export FrameMaker to QuarkXPress
DTP Tools’ MIF Filter ($99) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that lets you import MIF files exported from FrameMaker into QuarkXPress. It also lets you export QuarkXPress layouts to FrameMaker. They claim that all elements (large tables, page layout, graphic objects, styles colors, etc.) are maintained during conversion.DTP Tools (Goldwein Research){/ - Printer’s Spreads in QuarkXPress
Vision’s Edge’s Bookletizer ($49) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that converts documents from reader’s spreads to printer’s spreads and back again. It can also adjust for creep in longer documents.Vision’s Edge - BlackLining XTension
EMS’s BlackLining XTension ($1,195) has been updated for QuarkXPress 6. It retains a complete audit trail of all changes made to the text of a QuarkXPress document. It’s very useful for legal and financial documents. They also have a version for QuarkXPress 4 and 5 for $495.ThePowerXChange
Electronic Memory Services (EMS) - XPress-to-HTML
Gluon’s WebXPress 6.0 ($199) is a fast and powerful XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that walks you through a series of simple steps to export XPress documents as clean HTML 4. It can automatically create a hotlinked Table of Contents page from QuarkXPress style sheets (or you can manually select TOC items), and add “next” and “previous” buttons to each page. It can map QuarkXPress style sheets or type sizes to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Text can run around pictures, with picture captions intact. Images are converted to GIF or JPEG, with QuarkXPress’s cropping and sizing maintained. You can easily add hyperlink hotspots to pictures. Colors assigned to QuarkXPress items and text are converted to HTML colors. Dingbats are converted to HTML characters. Accents and special characters are mapped to HTML equivalents. Also available is WebXPress Pro ($399), which can batch-process many XPress documents, can export to eBook, XML and Palm OS, is SEC (Edgar) compliant, and is AppleScriptable.Gluon
The PowerXChange
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This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on July 7, 2004
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