X-Ray Magazine Online

Creative ideas start
with a blank slate

Blanks, or pre-manufactured papers, can run the gamut from simple pre-die-cut door hangers to triple-fold self-mail and return mail envelopes (think Publisher’s Clearing House), customer-loyalty cards (like those from your local grocery store), to pre-numbered, stubbed tickets printed on safety paper to prevent unauthorized reproduction. These two companies will give you new ideas for self promotion and for innovative offerings to your customers.

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starting with blanks

Multi Style II for QuarkXPress 8

Multi Style II XT for QuarkXPress 8 provides easy block-based style sheets for formatting of price lists, tab data, catalogue text, and more. This product leaps character-based and paragraph-based style sheets in a single bound.

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MadeToPrint with imposition for QuarkXPress and InDesign

For those who are using alap's Imposer and Imposer Pro, creating printer's spreads within QuarkXPress® is paramount to your workflow. It also means that until Imposer Pro is upgraded, you may not be able to upgrade to QuarkXPres 8. With the latest release of MadeToPrint for QuarkXPress and InDesign®, you can now upgrade with confidence.

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

Catalogue 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

Em 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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Watch the Movie

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

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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Better sites through blogging

Web sites are so passé. In a world of immediate gratification, unless you have a fairly extensive skill set that includes Dreamweaver®, HTML, CSS, and enough JavaScript®, and Flash® to get by, a traditional web site can leave you feeling frustrated. Being held hostage by an expensive or absent webmaster only compounds the issue as your noteworthy company announcements slip away without ever being posted to your most-visible and constant company marketing campaign.

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Better web sites with blogging

Enfocus Switch — to a better team

The Enfocus Switch product line-up is second to none in my book. Enfocus guides the entire PDF-creation process, works with all major design software, offers in-application support that clearly explains errors and fixes, and automatically corrects errors during preflight.

Read about Enfocus Switch

LinkOptimizer 4 for Photoshop and InDesign CS – CS4

LinkOptimizer is an InDesign Plug-in that works with Adobe Photoshop to reduce the size of images by eliminating excess image data, perform essential image adjustments such as color conversion and sharpening, and convert file formats. This handy utility will significantly reduce your InDesign document's file size, processing time, and production costs. If you are archiving files or sending them to an output device, LinkOptimizer provides you a succinct, compact file size perfect for back up, print, or transport.

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Working to create CourtSide Consulting, I put SiteGrinder through the paces

Every now and then I get writer’s block. Not because I can’t figure out what to write, but because the product seems so over my head that it intimidates me into silence. SiteGrinder seems like a great product, but far beyond my skill set — thus, writer’s block. With this article now under my belt, I have one thing to say: You have GOT to get this Plug-in!

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Put the squeeze on — get CopyFit

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

Imagine 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.

Read about CopyFlow Gold

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About X-Ray Magazine

ThePowerXChange.com publishes 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 workflow automation, PDF technology, 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 Enfocus Switch, PitStop Pro, PitStop Server, QuarkXPress®, InDesign®, Photoshop®, Illustrator®, Acrobat®, After Effects®, Director®, FreeHand®, PageMaker®, Painter®, Premiere® and Flash®.

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's Return is smart, clean, professional – and super informative."

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“The unit sales of North Atlantic Publishing Systems’ localization tool, CopyFlow Gold, are on track to double this calendar year. One of the big factors in the success of our QuarkXPress XTensions module has been ... the exposure they have given us in X-Ray Magazine. We’ve heard from customers. We know they read X-Ray Magazine,” says Peter Baumgartner, President, NAPS Inc.

Product stories

If you have a product in which you believe our readers might be interested, please click here to email our editor.

Making the most of your effort: shared content.

Recently, 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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TeXTractor for QuarkXPress 8 — for pulp-free text extraction

If 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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Index of PDF Articles