Product Reviews

As any QuarkXPress user will know, packing your application with all those XTensions that make your life so much better can be exhausting - and expensive. The range of available XTensions is vast, with some costing far more than XPress itself. To help out, Alap (A Lowly Apprentice Production) has bundled most of the QuarkXPress tools you'll ever need for less than £200.

First off is Shadow Caster, which creates soft shadows from text or graphics within XPress and can generate any number of shadow effects using a simple tabbed control palette. Adjustments to variables such as colour and shading allow you to get just the effect you want.

The XTension works by creating a TIFF file containing the shadow image, and then placing it behind the picture or text box that created it. The original item used will show the shadow effect as long as the Item Colour Value is set to None. Shadows can be created at any resolution, allowing designers to match the output resolution of the document they are working on.

Three basic shadow types are available: Silhouette, Outline for hard edge shadows, and Ghosted. Blur radius can also be adjusted to change the 'fuzziness' of the shadows. The radius is defined in pixels and ranges from 0 to 250, with the higher values producing a stronger effect. The resolution and blur controls are closely linked: the lower the resolution, the fewer pixels are available for the blur effect to work, and the same blur settings look very different when the resolution is altered.

The Burn tab in the palette allows a shadow to be 'burnt' or merged into an underlying image. The way in which the underlying pixels are affected can be altered using the Method pop-up menu, and the effect can be inverted. Shadow Caster creates a new image from the combination of the shadow TIFF and the underlying TIFF. The underlying image has to be a TIFF to use the Burn function; it has no effect on coloured picture or text boxes. To allow effects to be used against coloured backgrounds without the need to leave XPress, Shadow Caster can quickly produce coloured TIFF images at any size and resolution using either grey-scale, RGB or CMYK colour models.

Clipping can be used to limit the area affected by burning. Using polygonal boxes, clipping paths can be created to mask out areas of your image. Clipping paths within EPS images are also supported, producing smooth shadow effects from individual images. In combination with the Method option, clipping the burn produces very impressive results that could normally only be achieved in an image editor.

Shadow Caster is an impressive XTension which will quickly pay for itself in saved time alone. Its only drawback is the lack of a preview function.

The next productivity enhancer in the pack is Item Master, which adds several controls to the appearance and location of items within XPress, as well as their contents. It takes the concept of XPress Style Sheets a little further, allowing attributes associated with items to be saved as Item Styles. These can then be applied to picture or text boxes in the same way as XPress Style Sheets are applied to text.

Unlike text Style Sheets, Item Styles can be applied by dragging a style from the Item Style palette onto any item in the document. Any attribute can be altered within an Item Style, which provides a great deal of control over the appearance of common elements within a document. The same Item Style can be applied to different types of items, with each reacting only to attributes that affect it. A style applied to a picture box would produce different results when applied to a line or text box, for example.

When a style is changed, these changes are dynamically updated across the entire document. Styles can be moved between documents by adding them to the list in the Item Style

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palette, or by copying an item from one document to another.

Item Master adds five new commands to XPress' menu bars, as well as placing a new tool in the toolbar. The Items option in the Edit menu displays a dialog box for the creation of new styles. This lists all the Item Styles created, with the option to edit an existing style or create a new one. The new button brings up another dialog box where the style can be defined using the attributes available. A summary of the style appears at the bottom of the box for reference. The other new item in the Edit menu allows the polygons to be saved as specific shapes within a style. Polygons must be created using the standard tool in XPress, and the resulting shape can be imported using this option for re-use by the new polygon tool.

These two menu options are replicated in the Item menu: pop-out sub-menus allow individual styles to be applied to an item directly. The Show Item Styles option in the View menu brings up a palette containing a list of existing styles. These can be dragged onto existing items or used to create new items in a document.

The final element is the Polygon Style tool in the main tool bar. This lets you create polygons quickly with the polygon styles defined using the Polygon option in the Edit menu. Double-clicking on the tool brings up a dialog box from which the polygon shapes available are shown. Selecting one sets this shape as the default for the tool until it is changed.

The Finger Type XTension doesn't add functionality to XPress, but it does provide interactive control over text manipulation. Finger Type adds a floating palette, which can be accessed from the View menu, containing 10 text tools displayed as button icons. At the end of the bar is an interactive feedback area displaying information about tool settings on the fly.

What makes Finger Type so useful is the ability to dynamically adjust text attributes by clicking on the appropriate tool in the palette, selecting text and dragging the mouse. For example, to alter the leading value of a paragraph, you select the leading tool, click and hold anywhere in a paragraph, and then move the cursor up and down. The leading is dynamically altered on the fly. Other tools in the palette include those for setting kerning values, font size and scaling, indent, drop caps and rules. Several of the tools have a number of modes accessed by holding down key combinations. The rule tools have eight settings, each with a different cursor, which control their position and allow settings such as thickness to be adjusted.

XPert Tools Volumes 1 and 2 are the final elements of the pack. Together these contain 29 XTensions, ranging from XPert Loader, which acts like Apple's own Extension Manager, giving users a means to create and save sets of XTensions, to XPert Pilot, a palette-based preview window. Pilot gives users a thumbnail of pages within a document and allows views of the pages to be saved for instant access. Then there's XPert Layer XTension, which uses layers to organise information in the same way as others graphics packages.

The range of XTensions is such that most users will want to be selective about which ones they choose to install. That said, there is something here for everyone. Some - such as XPert Character Styles - provide functionality delivered by the soon-to-be-released XPress 4.0. But the advantage of this bundle is that these features are available now.

XPert Tools addresses the needs of pre-press and production users as well as designers with a number of document management enhancements. XPert Joblog, for example, keeps track of changes made to a document, and who made them. Each time a new document is created, a dialog box is displayed asking for a user and document name. This is used to track a document's progress, showing when the document was opened and saved.

XPert Quit allows users to set up XPress to automatically quit under certain circumstances. As well as freeing-up your system when XPress is not in use, users of multiple-licence copies on a network benefit, because copies not in use become available for others to work on.

Each element in this pack can be bought separately, but the individual cost of elements is far greater than the bundle price. The downside is that loading all the XTensions clutters up your screen, as well as increasing the time it takes XPress to boot up.