VTools, US$59
Macintosh Only

VTools is a new addition to my XTensions folder and is a migratory product from lots of other earlier Vision's Edge releases. This collection provides useful editing and production tools.

Advisory board provides redlining and a note tool for review-type workflows. You have two options when editing a document, select the altered text and click on either the mark or review buttons on the palette. Text that is to be deleted is marked in magenta; new or changed text is tagged for review in cyan. When the changes are approved, use the next button to find each change and click on fixed to remove the advisory comment. The magenta advisories are deleted and the cyan advisories are changed to black. Sure, it's a simple form of redlining, but it's also all that most of us need. (Don't put a checkmark against my list of seven, but if you need major-league blacklining capabilities, click here to check out Blacklining for QuarkXPress 7.)

The Advisory notes are special boxes that Advisory board can easily find and delete when they are no longer needed. Great for social commentary in shared documents.

The VTools' interface is a palette that puts several design and editing tools at easy access. You get baseline shift and horizontal scale attributes, and four buttons for rapid case conversion (uppercase, lowercase, word caps, or sentence caps).

Copy & Apply is a product that found its way into a number of previous collections, and for good reason. This tool copies the text or paragraph attributes from one selection of text and applies them to another selection — even style sheets.

There are a handful of other features that are shortcuts of sorts. It's not that you can't execute these features in QuarkXPress, it's just that it can be much easier: rotate and skew the contents of a text box, create unusual effects with text, rotate text differently from rotating the box, change the separation setting for spot colors, use a database of standard ad or publication sizes to quickly create new projects, and eliminate duplicate spaces and other character sequences.

ID2Q7, US$199
Mac/Windows

For nearly two decades, Markzware has been producing stable products, meeting customers' feature demands, and being innovative.

With the latest release of their conversion product, ID2Q7, QuarkXPress users gain a quick and easy way to convert InDesign files (v1.5 through v4) into QuarkXPress v6 or v7 documents with a single click. All elements of the InDesign document, including object positions, colors, text, text attributes, and images are converted, and it couldn't be any simpler. ID2Q7 also converts between cross-platform files, converting Windows InDesign files to Mac QuarkXPress 7.

Of course, conversion is performed to the best standard achievable by current technology, but it's not completely accurate. There are differences between the feature sets of the two applications, and these differences become even more apparent when you try to use one document inside another application.

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