Product Reviews

With the launch of XPress 4.0, many third-party XTensions were rendered obsolete, dissuading many desktop publishers and designers from making the upgrade. One of the more popular suites of general-purpose XTensions, QX-Tools, has now been brought into line with the upgrade, allowing users to move ahead without sacrificing the special tools they rely on.

On top of the original tools, QX-Tools 4.0 includes extra ones and a number of interface enhancements. The purpose of QX-Tools is to organise and simplify common tasks which could otherwise take hours. It provides a set of floating palettes for immediate access to commands and controls normally found deep inside dialog boxes, and for automating certain other routines. Palettes can be docked together into tabbed palettes to save screen space.

Two new tools are definitely worth checking out. QX-VectorEdit lets you import vector graphics (such as logos and clip art) and then edit them using XPress 4.0's Bezier tool. QX-ItemStyles is another wonderful idea which brings the principle of style sheets to other page elements such as frames, text boxes, rules, and so on. You could, for example, decide on styles for all box-outs in a publication to encompass frame weight and colour, text indent, columns and background colour. A couple of clicks applies the style to any text box, making a useful alternative to dragging pre-drawn page elements from XPress' Library palette.

QX-Tools 4.0's other palettes are upgrades of those in QX-Tools 2.0, and a couple of features have been removed since Quark has already added them to XPress 4.0. Arguably the most important of the upgraded tools is QX-FindChange, not least

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because XPress 4.0's own Find And Change palette is actually less flexible than it was in XPress 3.3. QX-FindChange will locate and amend anything in a document, not just text, according to a variety of properties from skew angle to colour blend, although Cool Blends aren't supported.

QX-Layers is another must-have utility, especially for complicated layouts. Being able to work in layers, just as you might in a graphics application, lets you organise how page elements are arranged to allow easy re-editing and grouping, and can make for interesting master pages, complete with invisible layers. If nothing else, QX-Layers makes it easy to select objects which are obscured by others.

Less essential, but still interesting, is QX-Scaler, which enhances the way XPress 4.0 handles object resizing. For example, you can select a group of objects and resize the lot in one go, optionally preserving certain properties such as frame weight. Best of all, QX-Scaler ensures any resizing action can be Undone immediately, which isn't otherwise possible when editing groups in XPress 4.0.

Four palettes, known collectively as QX-FineTune, provide quick access to dialog box settings for characters, paragraphs, rules and objects. These are especially useful when docked together and kept open at all times, rather like an alternative Measurements palette. Finally, QX-Viewer - a document thumbnail navigation palette - has been improved with scrollable multi-page functionality.

Upgraders should bear in mind that QX-Tools 4.0 is strictly an XPress 4.0-only suite, but is usefully supplied in both Power Mac and Windows versions on the Extensis CD. Extensis insists the suite will only work properly with XPress 4.03 as a minimum, so you should obtain the free patch from www.quark.com before installing; the XPress 4.03 patch on the Extensis CD is for the US version of XPress only.

QX-Tools 4.0 targets the general XPress user, and not just those performing some specialist function. Many of the utilities will be used on a daily basis, while others, such as QX-VectorEdit, might encourage you to try new things more often. Any single utility would be worth a shareware registration fee: the fact that the whole lot costs £99 is an unquestionable bargain.