Plug-Ins and XTensions: Slug Makers, File Annotators, Text Extractors, Word Importers for InDesign and QuarkXPress

Jay Nelson

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.

InDesign

• Instant Callouts in InDesign
  Triple Triangle’s Color Spec Cubed ($99) is a plug-in for InDesign that adds callouts that provide details about colors, fonts, and imported graphics wherever they are used. When used on a raster (bitmap) graphic, it shows its name, source, effective resolution and scale. It can create callouts for specific layers or selected items and even combine duplicate callouts. Callouts are made from standard InDesign text frames and lines, so you can edit them however you like.

Triple Triangle
A Unique MS Word Converter for XPress or InDesign
QuarkXPress and InDesign support only the most basic features when importing Microsoft Word documents. Bitmix’s qXport 3 ($99) is a utility that converts Word documents to QuarkXPress, InDesign, or XML formats, maintaining as many Word features as possible, including Index marks, Headers & Footers, tabbed tables, bullets, lists, symbols, paragraph and character style sheets, and colored text. You can specify fonts to replace other fonts, and its Unicode support lets you import Greek, Cyrillic and Eastern European text into QuarkXPress. It can also batch-convert multiple Word documents. qXport works with all versions of Word (Mac and Windows) starting with Word 97/98 and with QuarkXPress starting from version 4 in Mac OS X, OS 9, and Windows.
Bitmix
QuarkXPress

• JobSlug Pro
  Vision’s Edge’s JobSlug Pro ($79) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 6 that attaches a self-updating slug to a QuarkXPress document that includes the last time a file was modified, when it was last output and which fonts and colors were used in the document. The slug updates whenever the document is printed so the information that appears on your printed copy is as current as possible.

Vision’s Edge
The Most Powerful Spelling Fixer
Techno Design’s Speller XT 3.0 ($359) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 6 that takes spell-checking further: Its Expression Control feature verifies word combinations, to ensure consistent use of verbiage defined by corporate communications’ style guides, or to catch anomalies such as “graphic tablet” instead of “graphics tablet” or “like in America” instead of “as in America.” 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 foreign language versions include the spelling reform dictionaries for German, Swiss-German, Dutch, and French.
Techno Design
Easier EPSes & Printing of Selections
Alap’s XPert Print 2.1.2 ($100) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 that lets you print an area of a page, or export it as an EPS file with optional font embedding.
If you make a lot of EPS files, consider Vision’s Edge’s PageShot XS ($99). This XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5 or 6 allows you to save multiple pages as EPS files, save a portion of a page as an EPS file, or save selected text or graphic boxes as an EPS file, optionally including all fonts in the EPS. Its automation features can optionally save a document as an EPS every time the document is closed, and convert any document placed in a “watched” folder to EPS.
alap- a lowly apprentice production
Vision’s Edge
Intelligently Export Text from QuarkXPress
Vision’s Edge’s TeXTractor 6 ($99) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 6 that lets you export all the text in a document or selected portions of the text using any filter currently available to QuarkXPress. You can export only text that has a particular style sheet applied to it, or only text that was imported into QuarkXPress. You can even choose which stories should be exported from a document and rearrange the order in which they are exported.
Vision’s Edge
TIFF Export from QuarkXPress
Vision’s Edge’s TIFF Export 6 ($99) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 6 that lets you save your pages or spreads as TIFF files, with a resolution of 10 to 400 dpi.
For other file formats, including rasterization of placed EPS files, look into Gluon’s XPressImage 6 ($199).
Both companies also have versions for QuarkXPress 4 and 5.
Vision’s Edge
Gluon
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