XTags for QuarkXPress

Every two weeks Quark VS InDesign​.com and XChange International gives away 2 great prizes–an extra­or­di­nary xten­sion for QuarkXPress and an incred­i­ble InDesign plug-in. All you have to do to win is…

• Become a Quark VS InDesign​.com mem­ber (free), and;
• Throw your name into the give­away hat at the bot­tom of this page.

That’s all. No pur­chase or song and dance nec­es­sary. A win­ner will be cho­sen at ran­dom from those who enter on this page.

This con­test has end­ed. On 2008-08-10 we gave
Xtags from Em Software
To Michael D. of Los Angeles, CA USA

Congratulations, Michael! Get some prizes for your­self on our Contests & Giveaways page.

The QuarkXPress XTension We Gave Away This Time

Xtags
QuarkXPress XTension from Em Software

Xtags is XPress Tags on Steroids!

Xtags is a pow­er­ful import and export text fil­ter sup­port­ing the full Quark XPress Tags lan­guage plus sev­er­al major enhance­ments designed for picture-based data pub­lish­ing, clas­si­fied ad build­ing, input code con­ver­sion, data-driven doc­u­ment lay­out, and more. You can also copy and paste Xtagged text between appli­ca­tions or withinXPress itself, with Xtags.

Anchored text and graph­ics box creation.
Xtags sup­ports tags to cre­ate and fill anchored text and graph­ics box­es in-line with the tagged text, let­ting you con­trol all prop­er­ties of the anchored box­es using appro­pri­ate tag para­me­ters. You can fill a text box with fur­ther tagged text of any sort, and can fill a graph­ics box with a pic­ture of any type sup­port­ed by XPress. Anchored box­es are ful­ly sup­port­ed on out­put as well.

Unanchored text and graph­ics box creation.
Xtags sup­ports unan­chored text and pic­ture box tags that allow you to cre­ate and fill unan­chored box­es at the loca­tion on the page where an anchored box would have been placed, at an absolute posi­tion, at a posi­tion rel­a­tive to anoth­er box, or on the paste­board. These unan­chored box­es can span columns and can be moved freely once imported.

Auto-sizing.
Xtags can auto­mat­i­cal­ly size an anchored or unan­chored text or pic­ture box to fit its con­tents hor­i­zon­tal­ly or ver­ti­cal­ly, as well as size a pic­ture to its con­tain­ing box in the usu­al inter­ac­tive fashions.

Input code translation.
Xtags sup­ports a Â³use trans­la­tion table² tag that lets you apply a set of string trans­la­tions in a file to the input text, at a low­er lev­el than XPress Tag inter­pre­ta­tion (so that the trans­la­tion tar­get strings may con­tain tags). These sub­sti­tu­tions can be as sim­ple as char­ac­ter replace­ment, or as com­plex as for­eign front-end cod­ing translation.

Macros.
Xtags sup­ports macro def­i­n­i­tion and use to sim­pli­fy the invo­ca­tion of com­mon or com­plex tag and text sequences.

Master page selection.
Xtags pro­vides ³apply mas­ter spread² and ³apply mas­ter page² tags that choose the mas­ter spread or page to be applied to the text at the point of invo­ca­tion. With this facil­i­ty, you can build fair­ly com­plex doc­u­ments with input-driven per-spread or per-page layout.

General enhance­ments.
Xtags is more for­giv­ing than XPress Tags about the base lan­guage. Xtags also sup­ports rel­a­tive val­ues (e.g., increase point size by 20%), omit­ted para­me­ters, and the abil­i­ty to apply only the char­ac­ter styles from a style sheet to por­tions of a paragraph.

Error report­ing.
Xtags has an option­al facil­i­ty for report­ing on each error as it is encoun­tered, cre­at­ing a brief mes­sage direct­ly in-line at the point of error(unlike XPress Tags, which sim­ply quits).