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Plug-Ins and XTensions: The Spices of Software
Plug-ins extend the functionality of almost any graphics software application, adding specific features or tools you can use to cook up a page layout or spice up an image. With so many plug-ins available we turned to Design Tools Monthly, a leading reviewer of plug-ins and XTensions, to help us identify the good ones.
Written by Jay J. Nelson on September 3, 2002
Categories: Graphics, Graphics Image Editing, Illustration, Photo Image Editing, Print, Print Design & Layout, Features
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- Quickly Change PDF Options
- Much Easier PDF Editing
If you work with lots of PDF files, and need to set the General Information fields or Open and Security options, Merlin Open Systems' Options plug-in ($149) can really help. Options lets you set these options for an entire folder of PDFs from within Acrobat.
Merlin Open Systems www.merlin-os.co.uk
Enfocus PowerUp PDF ($99) is a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat that provides easier ways to edit text and graphics in a PDF file. You can edit paragraphs of text, and the text will reflow automatically. You can move, rotate, skew and layer objects, and replace RGB color with CMYK or spot colors. Its tools are seamlessly added to the Acrobat toolbar.
Enfocus Software www.enfocus.com
- Instant Complementary Color Schemes
- Simulate Color Blindness
- Inexpensive Photoshop Plug-ins
- Realistic Image Textures
Hot Door Harmony ($79) is a plug-in for Photoshop, that lets you easily create schemes of complementary colors, even Web colors, and use these color schemes in Photoshop, Illustrator or PageMaker. Color schemes can be based on existing colors, colors sampled from elsewhere on your Mac, or simply chosen from the color wheel.
Hot Door Inc. www.hotdoor.com
Colorfield Insight 1.0 ($49) is a plug-in for Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc., that simulates colorblindness, allowing you to evaluate the impact of colorblindness on your images quickly and easily. (Color deficiency affects approximately 7 percent of the male population.)
Colorfield Digital Media www.colorfield.com
If you wish you had a greater number of artistic resources for Photoshop, check out Sapphire Innovations. They regularly release new brushes and other effects for Photoshop, at really low prices. Each volume of brushes contains 1,000 brushes and costs £14.25 (US$19.95). They also sell inexpensive collections of patterns, textures, frames and shapes for Photoshop, effects plug-ins for Illustrator, symbol libraries for Flash, and nozzles for Painter. Their Website shows examples of each.
Sapphire Innovations www.sapphire-innovations.com
Andromeda Software's Series 4 Techtures ($109) is a Photoshop plug-in that lets you apply any of 900 hand-rendered textures to an image, each with your choice of blending engines: painterly, geometric, tiled, embossed, refractive, glass, water, lightening, spotlight and many more. These professional-quality effects must be seen to be believed. The package also includes Velociraptor, a motion-trails plug-in that creates velocity trails: arc, bounce, cascade, converge, curve, decline, fade, jolt, jitter, loop and spiral. Call for a brochure.
Andromeda Software www.andromeda.com
- Image-Enhancing XTensions Add Power to QuarkXPress
- Select Columns in QuarkXPress
- Much Better QuarkXPress Measurements Palette
- Redefine a Style Sheet to match selected text
- Interactively change almost any property for an item 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 in the Finder or launch its creator application
- Align a picture to any side of a box
- Change text case to UPPER, lower, Word Caps or Sentence caps
- Count words, characters or paragraphs
- Save and use custom view percentages
- Add guides precisely and step & repeat guides
- Table-making controls
- Insert special characters
- Convert measures between inches, mm, picas, pixels, etc.
- Open PageMaker Documents in QuarkXPress
- Book Design Helper
- Faster Copying While Dragging
Picture previews in QuarkXPress could be better; it's almost impossible to precisely position items in relation to objects in pictures. Also, if you want to export a high-quality image of an XPress page, "Save Page as EPS" is your only built-in option, and it can create enormous, RIP-thrashing files.
Fortunately, four XTensions help this situation: KGA's Enhance Preview XT ($99) enhances QuarkXPress's display of imported bitmap pictures so that they are crisp and clear. You can even zoom in to see details clearly, to confidently position items, crop pictures, and adjust clipping paths. Quark has a free "special edition" called EPXT-SE at its website and on the QuarkXPress 4.1 updater CD that lets you enhance one image at a time. Give it a try!
Now that your image previews are sharp, you can export the page for use in other layouts. That's where Gluon's XPressImage ($149) comes in. XPressImage lets you export items or pages in QuarkXPress in several formats, including GIF and JPEG, with control over resolution, dithering and compression. Ah, but what about placed EPS vector graphics such as logos? XPressImage includes a plug-in for Photoshop that automatically rasterizes placed EPS graphics and returns them to the appropriate place in your exported QuarkXPress layout. Now you can create instant, sharp bitmaps of any QuarkXPress page or item. Use it to create graphics for your website.
And finally, if you would like to import native Photoshop images into a QuarkXPress page, get Techno Design's Photoshop Import XT or alap's ImagePort ($99). These XTensions let you import a native Photoshop document, without first having to flatten it or save it in TIFF or EPS format. ImagePort also lets you turn layers, channels and masks on and off, and adjust the opacity and blending modes for layers. Think of how easy it can be to create a spot varnish, an emboss or foil -- just save it as a channel in Photoshop and turn the channel on or off in XPress!
KGA www.koyosha.com/xt
Gluon www.gluon.com
Techno Design www.techno-design.com
alap - a lowly apprentice production www.alap.com
Meadows Information Systems' Text Grabber ($99) is an XTension for QuarkXPress that lets you change text characteristics by dragging a marquee around the text. It's great for changing type specs for a tabbed column of text without affecting adjoining tabbed columns.
Meadows Information Systems aka Banta Integrated Media Publishing Solutions www.meadowsinfo.com
Badia FullMeasure XT 3.0 ($80, or $40 for a Lite version) expands the Measurements palette in QuarkXPress 5 to provide quick access to almost every control that is otherwise hidden in a QuarkXPress dialog box (a version for QX4 is also available). 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:
Badia Software www.badiasoftware.com
Markzware's PM2Q ($149) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 3 and 4 that opens Adobe PageMaker documents into QuarkXPress, or extract images stored within a PageMaker publication. PM2Q also offers a batch processing function for quickly converting multiple files.
It converts Windows and Macintosh PageMaker documents, versions 4.2 to 7.
Markzware's PM2Q5 ($189) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 5 that does the same thing, additionally preserving layers, complete text runaround options, and Hexachrome colors. It also lets you replace missing fonts upon conversion.
Markzware www.markzware.com
Pound Hill's Castoway ($70) is a powerful tool for book layout. It works with your text, font choices, pictures, page design and either QuarkXPress or InDesign to give you an idea of how many pages a book will occupy. If you design even a few books, Castoway is worth looking into. (Requires their $40 plug-in for InDesign or QuarkXPress.)
Pound Hill Software www.poundhill.com
Badia DragNCopy XT 1.0 is a free XTension for QuarkXPress 5 that lets you duplicate items by dragging while holding the Control key. It also remembers the offsets of the last DragNCopy operation, so you can generate additional copies of the last operation simply by pressing Command-D. Available only at www.badiaxt.com.
This article courtesy of Design Tools Monthly.
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PasteboardXT is OK
Don't listen to VF.
Pasteboard is an extremely useful XT and as someone mentioned was fixed shortly after it came out many years ago.
Don't be afraid of plugins and xtensions
It's great to see someone talking about these XTensions and plug-ins. People really need to get used to the idea that using a plug-in isn't weird or dangerous, but actually will help save time and money. The person who wrote about Pasteboard XT below didn't read the article very carefully.
--David Blatner, author, "real world quarkxPress 5"
VF got it wrong about PasteBoard XT
"VF" wrote in his comment that you shouldn't use PasteBoard XT. I think VF didn't read my paragraph completely. PasteBoard was released in early 1994, more than 8 years ago. Almost immediately, it was replaced by a version that does not require anyone to have PasteBoard to subsequently open a document. Bottom line: every version of PasteBoard after that first one in 1994 works just fine.
Just Don't Do It
Pasteboard XT
Do not install this plug in.
Do not install any plug in that then becomes a requirement for your system or software package without your knowledge or permission.
When this particular plug in first came out, it not only affected the systems of those who installed it, it also infected the systems of anyone (printers, service bureaus) who handled the infected file. This plug in acted as a virus and all so you can have a larger pasteboard.
Why install anything that does so little and can damage so much?
Think hard before you use plug ins and never ask advice from people who sell product. Ask the experts. Ask printers, production people, service bureaus. And only buy from reputable companies.
Otherwise, you can get yourself and your colleagues into some serious trouble with poor choices like Pasteboard XT.
Before you use an extension to allow you to put an original, layered Photoshop file into Quark, ask your printer if that file will still print correctly.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do it.