If your workflow includes output, of just about any nature, you might be spending more time than necessary to manage devices, output styles, or output tracking. MadeToPrint for QuarkXPress® or Quark Publishing System® is ideal for minimizing this resource sinkhole.

My first hands-on exposure to MadeToPrint came when I was called in as a consultant to a local newspaper. In their workflow, they manually generated a bitmap of each completed broadsheet with a unique name and sent the bitmap files to a print server for output. They knew that this process was time consuming, but they had not found a way out of the mire. With MadeToPrint, they were able to set up naming conventions for their pages and the XTensions® module managed the entire process. While unique page naming is a great feature of MadeToPrint, it barely scratches the surface. Let's dig deeper into a feature set that includes:

• Single-page output that creates one file per document page
• Rules-based file naming
• Preflight check of documents
• Automatic update of links and activation of project specific fonts
• PDF production using Acrobat® Distiller®
• Output of layers and layer combinations
• Package commands as part of the MadeToPrint job
• Configurable Infobar (job slug) with dynamically generated content
• Extendable output options using PostScript® snippets and scripts
• Batch processing of folder structures containing files
• Optional hot-folder mechanism and connection to editorial systems

Starting up

MadeToPrint (Mac or Windows, $449) and MadeToPrint Auto (Mac or Windows, $3179) are extensible technology. They require QuarkXPress or QPS as an engine. To those of you who regularly turn to XTensions, this is a familiar concept, but to users making their first foray, adding XTensions causes worry. XTensions will either become a citizen of an existing menu within an application, appear as a new menu to an application's menu bar, or cause palettes or tools to be added to the application's interface. Once MadeToPrint is successfully installed it is accessed from the file menu as shown in figures 1a and 1b.

Figure 1 MadeToPrint is prompted from the file menu of QuarkXPress.

Run dialogue box

When you choose the MadeToPrint option from the file menu, you will prompt the run dialogue box shown in figure 2.

Figure 2 On the left is the resulting dialogue box from InDesign and on the right, QuarkXPress. The functions are the same.

MadeToPrint provides for both jobs and sets (a container for jobs). A job is identified with a printer icon and a set with a folder icon. The run dialogue box contains a list of the jobs or sets that you have predefined, or in this case because this is the first time I've used the extension, I have only the default job available.

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