Tools of the Trades
Page 2

Cropster

Cropster (sold separately as Cropster ID or Cropster for QuarkXPress [Mac or Windows], US$99) has become the industry standard for creating mathematically perfect mechanicals within InDesign and QuarkXPress. With the palette interface, it's extremely easy to define and add custom crop marks, guidelines, fold marks, dimension arrows, registration marks, color bars, and more. Like Slugger, you can save presets of commonly used settings for easy recall in other documents.

Most commonly, you would use Cropster to place marks when your design workflow is to use an oversize page thereby enabling all bleeds and trims to be proofed and measured. In some cases, this means creating a set of 8.5” x 11” crop marks on a tabloid-sized page. In ad production, setting up the live area with clearly delineated trim and bleed is usually the first step — and with Cropster it can be the easiest.

Figure 4 The Cropster dialogue box is made up of five panes. The first pane is where you set the options for the crop marks place at the document boundaries.		Figure 5 In the position pane, you set the distance for the placement and the weight and length of the marks.
Figure 6 In the folds pane, set the placement of each fold mark.		Figure 7 Registration marks can be defined as well. You may also include your logo on the slug (as shown in the sample slug below).
		Figure 8 In the presets pane, save your settings for use on other documents.

ProScale

With ProScale (sold separately as ProScale ID or ProScale EV for QuarkXPress, US$139), you can resize items, groups, page ranges, or entire documents/projects. While ProScale is not the only scaling Plug-in or XTensions module, it is one of the most advanced and a logical tool to include in this hat trick. I point this out because while you may already have a product that provides this function, it's probably not a suitable reason to avoid investing in StudioPack.

ProScale scales non-proportionally without distorting pictures and text, but providing that the distortion is exactly what you do want, you may also scale flexigraphically. Gluon has provided you with scaling presets for common sizes that allow you to quickly move documents from letter size to A4 and vice versa as one of the options. With this product, you may control every aspect of the scaled object(s) and how that scaling is applied. This includes page size, guides, gutters, margins, and virtually every other measurable setting. In addition to the dialogue box interface, ProScale includes a visual-scaling tool found in the tool palette.

Figure 9 The ProScale dialogue box contains three panes from where you will define the scaling parameters: scale, options, and presets.		Figure 10 In the options pane, define whether or not a particular type of item will be scaled and if should be scaled proportionally.
		Figure 11 Like most Gluon products, saving presets enables you to define your options and then reapply those options through a single click.

Adding StudioPack to your InDesign or QuarkXPress workflow — especially if you are an ad agency — is not only about saving time, it's about accuracy. It's about making sure that you and others working on a project have visual indicators when something is amiss. it's about consistency, too. Create one ad and use the scaling tool to resize it for use in multiple publications, without worry that an error has been created in one of the versions. This set is about confidence.

StudioPack for InDesign		StudioPack for QuarkXPress 7

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