Product Reviews

Back in the 1990s, QX-Tools was a vital set of DTP add-ons to the then-dominant QuarkXPress. The return of this suite of XPress XTensions after a lengthy absence and a change of ownership is welcome, if not triumphant.

QX-Tools Pro 7 comprises more than a dozen palette-based XTensions to extend the power of XPress. Most critically, it supports XPress 7 and Intel Macs, but the suite also includes a few new gems in an otherwise mixed collection.

Pick of the new bunch is QX-SuperSelect, an XTension that enables you to highlight and edit text from different areas of a text box at once. Handily, SuperSelect even works between text boxes - words selected in one text box remain highlighted even when another text box is selected.

Another welcome addition is QX-DragAndDrop, which enables you to drag, InDesign-style, text files and images from the Finder onto a document. It's amazing that this feature still isn't built into XPress, but it's nonetheless welcome and works well.

The new version also includes some less essential palettes. Among these are QX-Underline, which tweaks XPress' capabilities so you can, for example, avoid descenders in letters such as 'y' or 'j'; and the QX-WYSIWYG palette, which lists available fonts in their own typeface and lets you apply a font by clicking its entry in the palette. Another new entry, QX-Tips & Tricks, simply comprises a navigable series of sporadically useful XPress hints.

Elsewhere, it's good to see some of QX-Tools' existing features at last becoming available to XPress 7 users. Among these, QX-FindChange is the most powerful. It expands XPress' native and anaemic Find/Change command to search for and replace not only text, but also the parameters of virtually any object

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element in a document. In version 7, you can stack several find and replace functions together, enabling you to build complicated and almost infinitely customisable search and replace routines.

Other improved XTensions include QX-ItemStyle, which lets you copy and store box attributes and quickly apply them, and QX-Viewer, which shows a navigable thumbnail of the page. QX Viewer was once invaluable for displaying an overview of a layout - a feature no longer needed, thanks to XPress 7's multiple page views - but it now also houses navigation buttons that make it easy to navigate a layout. QX-Shortcuts, a palette that displays keyboard shortcuts, has been beefed up to allow you to set and apply your own shortcuts.

QX-Scaler is a flexible way to scale multiple page elements. The only drawback is that we couldn't use XPress' Undo command to revert to a previous state. Oddly, QX-Scaler has its own Undo button on its palette, with only one level of undo.

Not every element makes the transition to version 7 gracefully. A virtually unchanged QX-Objects palette still makes it easy to adjust object attributes, such as border, frame shading or skew, but anyone who has used XPress 7 for more than a few minutes knows you can now do this almost as easily from the new Measurements palette.

The same criticism can be applied to QX-Character, a palette to adjust character attributes. Again, most users will save screen space and use the Measurements palette instead. And we're not sure what role is occupied by QX-Layers - a palette that allows you to place page elements on separate layers - given that it competes for attention with XPress' own layering feature.

It's worth noting that QX-Tools has also discarded some features from earlier versions, including basic preflighting tools and the ability to import Excel documents as EPS files. To be fair, few will miss these, as comparable features are now built into XPress. Upgraders should also note that QX-Tools 7 doesn't work with earlier versions of XPress, although OnOne has bundled QX-Tools Pro 5.1, which works with XPress 6 or later. This obviously lacks QX-Tools Pro 7's new features, though.

QX-Tools contains a couple of undeniably useful tools, but despite its attractive price, it's no longer an essential weapon in the XPress user's arsenal.