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.
Find Old Plug-ins
www.ExtensionStore.comis a new area of ThePowerXChange’s website, focused on helping you find new plug-ins that have the features you miss from old plug-ins that aren’t being updated. As applications continue to evolve, not all plug-ins evolve with them, but new ones are developed all the time. This site aims to help you find new solutions to time-tested problems.
- PDF/X Checkup
Apago’s PDF/X Checkup 3.0 ($249) is a plug-in for Acrobat 5 or 6 that checks a PDF file for compliance with the PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-3 prepress standards, and can fix the most common errors automatically. In addition, it can check for other common errors, such as minimum and maximum image resolutions, maximum allowable spot colors, JPEG compression, and fonts that aren’t PostScript Type 1. It also includes Apago’s Box Editor plug-in (reg. $29), which lets you set an ad’s art, trim and bleed boxes to a publication’s specifications, then save the settings for future use.
- Create BarCodes in InDesign
Cacidi’s Extreme BarCodes ($298) is a plug-in for InDesign that creates 14 different kinds of bar codes from digits you supply.
- Much Better QuarkXPress Measurements Palette
Badia FullMeasure XT 3.1 ($80, or $40 for a Lite version) expands the Measurements palette in QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 to provide quick access to almost every control that is otherwise hidden in a QuarkXPress dialog box. Your productivity gain is huge, because FullMeasure’s context-sensitivity places the controls you need at your fingertips, no matter what you’re editing. In addition, it has unique, efficiency-enhancing controls such as:- Redefine a Style Sheet to match selected text.
- Choose a font from a list of fonts used in the document.
- Interactively change almost any value by pressing Up and Down arrows.
- Align items to each other or to the page.
- Determine the “effective” resolution of a picture, which takes into account scaling.
- Fit box to picture or text.
- Show a picture file in the Finder or launch its creator application.
- List fonts & colors used in imported EPS files.
- Align a picture to any side of a box.
- Change text case to UPPER, lower, Title Case or Sentence caps.
- Count words, characters or paragraphs.
- Adjust view percentage with a slider.
- Save and use custom view percentages.
- Add guides precisely, create a guide at text baseline, and step & repeat guides.
- Useful table controls.
- Insert special characters.
- Convert measures between inches, mm, picas, pixels, etc.
- Embed Fonts in QuarkXPress EPS
FontWizard XT ($139) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that embeds fonts into EPS files created by QuarkXPress.
- Greek and Ungreek Text in QX6
Gluon’s Greeker ($59) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 6 that converts your already-formatted text into nonsense, so that your client will focus on the design, not the copy. It also instantly converts the “greek” back to your original text. It maintains font styles, sizes, line breaks, capitalization, etc., so your greeked text truly looks like the actual text.
- The Most-Powerful Scaler
Gluon’s ProScale 7 ($139) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6, or a plug-in for InDesign, that lets you resize an entire multipage document with complete control over what gets scaled, and how. For example, you can scale all the pages of a document, including the text, but maintain rule and/or frame sizes. You can scale pages non-proportionally, while maintaining the proportions of page items. You can save your settings to reuse in the future, and undo a scaling operation with Command-Z. A “Fit To” popup menu lets you choose common sizes such as A4, A5, business card, 1/3 page, 1/2 page, letter size, tabloid size, etc. Or, you can just click and drag selected items to a new size. You can quickly fit an entire ad to a column width, or scale from the center of a selection. You can step-and-repeat your scaling — perfect for logo sheets. It’s extremely fast, and lets you undo the scaling!
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This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on October 14, 2003
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