Each month Design Tools Monthly reviews some of the best plug-ins and XTensions on the market. Most of the mentioned products can be purchased through The PowerXChange.

InDesign

• Text-Measuring Wizard
  SoftCare's Text-O-Meter is a plug-in for InDesign or an XTension for QuarkXPress 3 and 4 that not only counts the number of characters or lines in selected text or linked text boxes, but also can calculate how much text would be necessary to fill a text box. It also provides a constantly-updating display of how many words are in a text box, so you can write to a predetermined length. The InDesign version also can create a new text frame for overset text, which deletes itself once the text has been adjusted to eliminate the overset. $75 for QuarkXPress; $99 for InDesign.
  SoftCare GmbH

Photoshop

• Realistic Focus Tools for Photoshop
  Andromeda Software's VariFocus Filter ($47) is a Photoshop plug-in that lets you vary the depth of field in an image, to sharpen the focus on a foreground object, while defocusing the background. The package also includes Shadow Filter, which creates realistic 3D shadows with edges that blur and soften with distance. You can also create multiple shadows by moving multiple lights and color filters, using a virtual camera to pan around in 3D space.
  Andromeda Software

• Replace Colors Quickly
  Digital Light & Color's Color Mechanic Pro ($50) is a plug-in for Photoshop that makes it easy to realistically replace an object's color with another color. It's quick and it works.
  Digital Light & Color

QuarkXPress

• Similarity XT
  Badia's Similarity XT 1.0 ($60) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4.1 or 5 that does something we've never seen before: it lets you find items with almost any combination of attributes and then apply changes to almost any other attribute. Conditionals such as "is", "is not" and "is greater than" let you refine the search. The options are far too numerous to list here, but if you create or edit QuarkXPress documents all day, it's worth looking into. You can download a fully functional demo from their website.
  Badia Software

• Overset Text Checker
  Callas Software's AirBag XT ($69) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 3 or 4 that checks for overset text when you Open, Save, Print, or Save as EPS, and it takes you directly to the problem for fixing.
  Callas Software

• Link Prices in QuarkXPress
  PriceLynx ($299) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4 that automatically updates prices in a QuarkXPress document, based on price information in a plain-text document exported from a database or spreadsheet. You can manually identify the items in your document that have prices, or if your document uses a regular pattern for items and prices (for example, Product Number, Item, Description, Price), then PriceLynx can tag them all automatically once you've shown it the pattern.
  Available from The PowerXChange

• How Design Tools Monthly Makes Its PDFs
  Techno Design's PDF Design Pro ($299, or $99 for a Lite version) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 3 or 4 that lets you create all hyperlinks, article threads and bookmarks for an Acrobat PDF from within QuarkXPress. It can even create them automatically, based on style sheets or character attributes. In addition, you can create one PDF from several QuarkXPress documents.

  We use PDF Design Pro to create PDFs of Design Tools Monthly. Here's how: We format each of our headlines with a QuarkXPress Style Sheet. Everywhere the XTension sees text formatted with this Style Sheet, it converts the text to a PDF Bookmark.

  We format URLs with the Letter Gothic typeface. Wherever PDF Design XTension sees Letter Gothic, it converts the text to a hyperlink and uses the text as the URL.

  Each chain of linked QuarkXPress text boxes is converted into a threaded PDF Article, so that each time our readers click on an article, they see the next full screen of the story -- regardless of where it's jumped to.

  Finally, when Acrobat Distiller converts our PostScript file to PDF, it automatically creates our bookmarks and hyperlinks!
  Techno Design

• Free XTensions!
  Meadows Utility Bundle is a collection of free XTensions for QuarkXPress 3 or 4 that let you do the following: gather all fonts used in the document -- including those used in imported EPS graphics; select an area of a page to print or Save as EPS; embed fonts in exported EPS files; retain a picture box's scaling, cropping, rotation, etc. when you replace its picture; and label every picture with its file name. (The picture name boxes can be toggled on and off and can also be suppressed from printing.)
  Available only at Meadows Information Systems, a division of Banta Integrated Media Publishing Solutions

This article courtesy of and copyrighted by Design Tools Monthly. For a free sample of the printed newsletter, email info@design-tools.com.