by Tami Stodghill

With CopyFit Desktop for QuarkXPress or InDesign you may find yourself with a lot more time on your hands!

The power of the CopyFit Desktop XTensions™ module for QuarkXPress® or Plug-in for InDesign® in handling overset and underset 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 underset 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.

Figure 1 CopyFit is neatly contained within its own easy-to-use palette.

CopyFit Desktop for QuarkXPress	CopyFit Desktop for QuarkXPress
CopyFit Desktop for InDesign	CopyFit Desktop for InDesign

CopyFit adds a new option under the Window menu of either the QuarkXPress or InDesign interface titled show CopyFit palette. The fit pop-up is used to specify what boxes you want to copy fit. You can select box to fit a single, currently selected box; select all to fit all boxes in the current document; or select tagged to fit only those boxes that you’ve tagged with the tag box option. CopyFit then provides three different methods of copy fitting: shrink to fit, expand to fit, and either. Choosing the Shrink to fit option will change only overset boxes and ignore underset ones, whereas the expand to fit option will change only underset boxes. 

CopyFit has its own custom find feature that can be used to find boxes that are overset in your document(s). Just click the Find First button, sit back for a moment (but only a moment), and have CopyFit scan your document and locate the first overset box. Here, I should note, you can set a CopyFit preference to ignore any box whose overflowing text consists only of non-printing characters such as spaces or returns, if you choose.

CopyFit provides six different text-formatting attributes that can be applied in order to copy fit a box: tracking, horizontal scaling, point size, leading, space before (a paragraph), and space after (a paragraph). To utilize a CopyFit formatting attribute, you just tick the box next to that attribute. Each attribute has a minimum and maximum allowable adjustment value, as well as a step amount (the amount by which a particular attribute will be increased or decreased) in order to fit the text. CopyFit also provides the option of remembering these changed attribute settings by selecting the update set button, so you can easily use them again in the future. Handily, each formatting attribute can also be assigned a priority to determine the order in which its specified adjustment will be applied allowing you to basically customize CopyFit to your particular needs. 

Figure 2 Watch the headline as I use CopyFit to automatically make adjustments for a perfect fit.

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