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.
- Free Dreamweaver Accessibility Extension
UsableNet has free extensions for Macromedia Dreamweaver MX that check for Web accessibility compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. It can report on an entire website, particular pages, or selected sections or folders. An additional online service lets you schedule regular checks of live websites.
- iMovie Effects
GeeThree’s transitions and effects for iMovie add a unique, professional touch to your digital portfolio. Volume 1 ($30) includes more than 40 transitions, including page peels and curls, doors, blinds, spin and zoom, as well as 14 effects including film noise, mosaic, emboss, posterize, solarize and x-ray. Volume 2 ($30) includes 50 more, including vapors, washes, textures, sweeps, fluids, filmstrip, letterbox and comb bands. Volume 3 ($50) has over 30 title effects, 50 advanced transitions, and several special effects. Volume 4 ($50) lets you superimpose logos, use advanced blue screen technology, picture-in-picture, split screen, and still-image panning.
- Better Enlargements
Human Software’s XFile ($50) is a plug-in for Photoshop 5.5 or higher that can enlarge an image with better results than Photoshop’s built-in methods. It works in Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. See their Web site for striking examples.
- PhotoKit
Pixel Genius’s PhotoKit 1.1 ($50) is a plug-in for Photoshop 7 that replicates analog photographic effects, including warming and cooling filters, toning effects, film grain, and color-to-grayscale conversions using colored filters. It includes 141 effects and works on Mac OS 9 and X.
- EtchTone
Andromeda Software’s EtchTone Filter ($89) is a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop that generates a randomized etch (black and white line conversion) of a gray or color photograph or illustration, and then lets you overlay or blend the etch back onto the original image. The result, an EtchTone, is a continuous tone image that adds interest and softens the harshness of halftone print.
- The Most Powerful Spelling Fixer
Techno Design’s Speller XT 3.0 ($299) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4.1, 5 or 6 that takes spell-checking further: It can convert American English spelling into British English spelling and vice-versa, and is tuned to look for mistakes common in OCR (optical character recognition) conversions. Its Expression Control feature verifies word combinations, to catch anomalies such as “graphic tablet” instead of “graphics tablet” or “like in America” instead of “as in America.” Its foreign language versions include the spelling reform dictionaries for German, Swiss-German, Dutch, and French.
- Text Styles Unmasked
Gluon’s SpecTackler ($199) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4 or 5 that places a description of the fonts, colors and style sheets used in text directly on the page, complete with arrows pointing to where the style is used. Any text that has been manually changed to be different from the original style sheet is also noted. It can also create a summary of all style sheets in the document and place it on the pasteboard, making it easy to see exactly how the document was constructed. When used with Gluon’s ColorBreaker XTension ($199), all colors, graphics, and text can be completely documented.
- Much Better Printing from QuarkXPress
Badia Software’s Printools ($80) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4 or 5 that dramatically improves the printing experience. You can see, in a live preview window, how your document will print, including paper boundaries. In addition, you can print just part of a page by dragging your mouse over an area or item(s) in the preview. You can add a temporary page border to the print, and add page slugs showing owner name, machine name, bleed, scaling, line screen, emulsion and any custom text you like.
It shows spreads, crop and registration marks, registration offset, calibration bars, page slug, bleed, page sequence, back-to-front printing, print as thumbnails, page orientation, page positioning, scaling, color, gray or black-and-white printing, page gap, page flipping, negative printing, manual tiling, auto tiling and auto tiling overlaps. It can also warn you when the document size is larger than the paper in the printer or imagesetter. It can preflight a document to detect RGB images, text overflows, missing fonts, and low-resolution pictures. It can also automatically check every document before it is printed. You can batch print multiple documents using the same output settings. You can save and redefine print styles, output several usage reports including style sheets, and track revisions and editing time.
This article courtesy of and copyrighted by Design Tools Monthly. For a free sample of the printed newsletter, email info@design-tools.com.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on June 11, 2003
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