In this review on QuarkVSInDesign.com, I go on at length about some products of a publisher called Badia Software. I am really quite impressed with thier quality.
They have freebies there. The concept of a "loss-leader" is nothing new to marketing, and freebies are the ultimate. The free sofware available there, though, is so good I feel like I should be paying something for it.
Badia is one of the software developers who craft what is known, in the QuarkXPress argot, XTensions. If you're an InDesigner, you'd say plug-ins. These are applets which do not stand along, but add functionality to a host application. QuarkXPress comes with several XTensions standard, and many third-party developers make quite a good living producing XPress-compatible XTensions. All that's needed to do, usually, is dragon-drop the XTension into the XTensions folder, and they appear the next time XPress is fired up.
Enough digression, though. What I'm truly impressed with is the Badia freebies. They have four, and I've installed two. The ones I have on board right now, Vistas and ReplaceInPlace, appeal by giving XPress functions that come standard on InDesign.
Yes. There's that feature-parity thing again. Anyway.
Vistas is a graphical navigation palette. Very simple and elegant: a previous-view button, a slider for zoom, and a dropdown for instantly jumping to any spread in the document. The slider-zoom has an extremely lively live-effect, and the XTension as a whole works flawlessly, and is intiuitive to boot; I figured out how to use it in mere minutes with no reference to any readmes or manual documents. Even the non-obvious features-clicking on the thumbnail to recenter and dragging of a box on the thumbnail to zoom-gave themselves up after a very short search.
ReplaceInPlace brings another something InDesign does naturally to XPress. After doing another edition of the Columbia Overlook, it was once again made plain just how nifty a thing replacing-in-place...importing a new graphic to a graphic frame whilst preserving attributes such as scaling and position...is. Not having to resize and move a graphic within its frame is a good burden to have removed.
XPress doesn't do it, at least, not until one installs the ReplaceInPlace XTension. It adds a new tab to the Get Picture dialog (titled ReplaceInPlace) with a checkbox allowing the user to specify preservation of content attributes. XPress layout artists should love this.
As far as I'm concerned, these are two XTensions that I don't plan on doing without, provided that Quark doesn't come out with this functionality in V7.
There are also super for-price XTensions that answer a lot of needs. I highly recommend checking out the FullMeasure XTension, which brings a supercharged Measurements palette to XPress that allows you to access nearly every XPress command from the Measurements palette. If it's crafted as tightly as the freebies are, XPress users really owe it to themselves to check them out.
Badia Software's website is http://www.badiaxt.com
By Samuel John Klein of Portland, Oregon - Graphic Designer without Portfolio, aspiring artist who dawdled too long.
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