Photo/Graphic Edges gives your images the professional edge

Photo/Graphic EdgesI seldom have to do a piece that is strictly artwork. Whether working on an ad, brochure, article, or blog, I typically format a great deal of text and have little to do with artwork. On the rare occasion when I do get to dig in, thankfully, tools such as Photo/Graphic Edges give my work a polished, professional look without the years of training.

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Do you need road signs in order to track your InDesign document changes? Get CtrlChanges

CtrlChanges for InDesignI don't happen to own or work in InCopy, but I've often thought that I'd like to hijack features from it for InDesign, specifically the track changes functionality — the ability to visually be able to see what has been changed in my InDesign document has always been high on my wish list.

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From the moment we wake up we are looking at type — ugly or not

Digital TextWe wake up in the morning to silence our alarm, the one with the digital display. Wiping away the sleep from our eyes, we fumble for the remote and tune in to the local TV station to catch the weather forecast with its corny graphics. Then it’s off to make coffee in the electric coffee maker and heat up a frozen breakfast in the microwave. After showering and dressing, we check for any missed calls on our cell phone, and then boot up the computer and log on to our email accounts.

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Xcatalog Pro for QuarkXPress and InCatalog Pro for InDesign will reign in your wayward catalogues

Xcatalog for QuarkXPress and InCatalog for InDesignCatalogue production may be the most time consuming of all publishing projects. A single catalogue can be a burden on everyone: IT managers, database creators, designers, photographers, production artists, and even the customer. There may be dozens of collaborators, thousands of pages, tens of thousands of images, and yet somehow you are expected to pull it all together into a beautiful, easy-to-navigate design with every last-minute pricing update, product description, and photo in place and perfect. With Xcatalog and InCatalog, not only is this possible, it's easy.

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Jump into variable-data messaging with Xdata for QuarkXPress and InData for InDesign

Xdata for QuarkXPress and InData for InDesignEm Software, the manufacturer of Xdata for QuarkXPress and InData for InDesign, touts their products as mail merge on steroids. I think that definition is an understatement — of huge proportions.

In our screencast and in the images on the pages of this story, you will get a real feel for the power of Xdata and InData. It's not just about importing data, it's about styling that text on import and removing as many manual tasks as possible. Take a look and see for yourself.

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pdfToolbox 4 for Acrobat 8/9. The entire toolbox — from printer's spreads to color management.

pdfToolbox 4

By some accounts, today's output providers are getting up to 80% of customers' projects as PDFs. In-house publishers are often 100% PDF workflows. With all these PDFs floating around in cyberspace and ethernet, what's in your arsenal to ensure that what you see is what you output? pdftoolbox 4 is more than just a bigger hammer.

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Fluid Mask 3. Cutting-edge technology redefined.

Fluid Mask 3

Cutting detailed masks is time consuming and challenging, but with Fluid Mask 3 image editors and graphic designers alike will benefit from these easy-to-use tools and generous previews wrapped up as a Photoshop Plug-in or stand-alone application. With QuarkXPress' PSD Import palette, you can import these complex paths with unparalleled support for layers, channels, and paths.

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Put the squeeze on — get CopyFit

CopyFit for QuarkXPress or InDesignThe power of the CopyFit Desktop XTensions™ module for QuarkXPress® or Plug-in for InDesign® in handling overset and under set text isn’t readily apparent from just a brief product description, so let's try for a full article.

CopyFit is designed to detect and remedy overset or under set text conditions in any QuarkXPress or InDesign document. The automation and time savings it offers over manually dealing with these issues is amazing, to say the least.

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Marriage, separation, and divorce of words — Use and misuse of hyphens and spaces

The use and misuse of hyphensThe presence or absence of hyphens or spaces affects the meaning of words significantly. This holds true for many languages. While some spell-checker programs, such as *TALŌ's, handle hyphens and spaces correctly, many programs don't. This article shows examples taken from several languages that illustrate the importance of correctly used or correctly omitted hyphens and spaces. Correctly handled words are shown in italics while incorrectly handled words appear in bold. In this section examples taken from various languages are shown to illustrate the use and misuse of hyphens and spaces.

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A life without extensions would be dismal indeed

A dismal life without extensionsBeing in the software-distribution business has its definite advantages. Every cool new tool that comes across my desk, I get to try; and while a number of them wouldn’t benefit my daily workflow, a larger percentage of them would, and that’s where I count myself lucky.

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Text and anchored graphics content in your QuarkXPress projects and InDesign documents are a valuable commodity.

 

CopyFlow Gold for QuarkXPress and InDesignImagine being able to export all of the individual text boxes of a catalogue, translate the text, and then have it flow back into the document, in the same way it was exported. How about exporting all the text for archiving, or for creating web pages, or populating a database? It's not impossible, it's the feature set of CopyFlow Gold: round-tripping — or just exporting — of text and graphics between QuarkXPress or InDesign and Word RTF or tagged text files.

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Still activating and now shipping: Extensis Suitcase Fusion 2

X-Ray Magazine v5n7 Apple Xcode 3 UnleashedSuitcase Fusion 2 is an early adopter, with seamless auto-activation support for Adobe InDesign and Illustrator CS3/CS4 and QuarkXPress 7/8. It's more than the upgrade you've been waiting for.

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TeXTractor for QuarkXPress 8 — for pulp-free text extraction

TeXTractor for QuarkXPress 8If you're tasked with getting out what was once put in — text that is — TeXTractor for QuarkXPress 8 will fast become your favorite XTensions module. Now supporting QuarkXPress 8 (and 4, 6, and 7, too), breathe easy knowing that you can give your cut and paste keys a rest.

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OpenNow Pro for InDesign CS3 and now for QuarkXPress 8

OpenNow Pro for InDesign CS3 and QuarkXPress 8When your fingers and brain cells are collaborating on your latest award-winning design, and the ideas are coming fast and furious, the last thing you want to do is actually stop and think about what you're doing. Editing graphics while you're deeply entrenched in your page-design application is always a pain, especially the part about choosing the best application for the job. OpenNow Pro — for QuarkXPress and InDesign — intervenes on your behalf.

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About X-Ray Magazine

Cyndie Shaffstall is publisher, editor, and contributing author of X-Ray Magazine, an online publication dedicated to the published word, and by proximity, desktop-publishing, design, electronic-content creation, pre-press, and printing.

X-Ray Magazine's content often leans toward the extensions, XTensions, Plug-ins, and utilities used by the readers — or that should be used. Within our pages, you will find stories on applications, and the extensible technology for applications, such as QuarkXPress®, InDesign®, Photoshop®, Illustrator®, Acrobat®, After Effects®, Director®, FreeHand®, PageMaker®, Painter®, Premiere®, Flash®, Quark Publishing System®, QuarkCopyDesk®, and QuarkXPress Server®.

The stories are published in English primarily, though many stories have been translated to Korean (through partner, InCube Technologies), Dutch, and French.

X-Ray Magazine, provides best-practices articles, step-by-step feature lessons, case studies, new-feature previews, new-product reviews, tips and tricks, and product shortcuts and secrets that can be used immediately to solve real-world problems in a workflow.

Bill Nyman, a tenured professor of graphic design at The College of New Jersey, said the publication is "Absolutely fantastic – X-Ray Return is smart, clean, professional – and super informative."


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Making the most of your effort: shared content.

X-Ray Magazine Shared ContentRecently, Joe Root noticed that he was using a text and picture boxes in several places and constantly manipulating that content over and over in the different places where the content had been placed...and then it dawned on him... Find out what.

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