Product Reviews

Such is the pace at which QuarkXPress turns others' XTensions into features of its own, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the market for good third-party add-ons had evaporated. Not so. Gluon's Cropster 8 and ProScale 9, which are updated for XPress 8, show that there's still a healthy need for third-party XTensions. Cropster greatly extends XPress' rudimentary control over printers' marks. Once installed, you can add crop and registration marks, guides, dimension arrows and even fold marks around any selected page object or the entire page. Controls for each mark are adjusted under separate tabs in a dialog box. For crops, you set the width and height of bleed, trim and safety settings, and apply arrows, with labels, to clarify crop dimensions. You can add colour bars and CMYK legends to registration marks. Under the Folds tab, you can set vertical or horizontal folds for regular or custom folds.

With each type of mark, you can choose whether it should be added to a separate Cropster layer, although guides remain visible in all layers. Layer support is useful, as you can view and print the document with or without registration marks by adjusting settings in XPress's Layers palette.

Once you've established your settings, you can store them as a preset. These are accessed from the Cropster dialog and can be applied to other items or documents.

Two other Cropster menu options speed up common tasks. One instantly deletes all Cropster registration marks and guides, the other

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lets you create a new document with dimensions matching the trim settings of a selection. Alternatively, if you have a single object selected, Cropster uses the object's bounding box as its document size.

ProScale 9 is an XTension for those all-too-frequent moments when you have to repurpose artwork from one page layout to fit another. While XPress 8 no longer requires you to group objects before resizing, it's still far from perfect, as some page elements don't scale as you would expect. ProScale 9 is more versatile, and its results less unpredictable. You can scale an object, a group of objects or the entire document either by a specific percentage, or to fit to a specified size, such as a column, quarter-page panel or full spread. You choose the properties to include when you resize from an exhaustive list of checkboxes. Alongside standard options, such as whether to apply scaling to strokes or text, are the ones you wish XPress included as standard: ProScale even lets you scale tab measurements and guides. Even better, if text is based on an existing style sheet, that style's properties can be automatically adjusted to reflect the changed text size.

If you open ProScale's dialog with a text selection active, you can also scale the selection - another trick XPress still can't perform. In fact, you fit text to boxes or stories with fine control over not just text size, but leading and line spacing among others.

ProScale's modal dialog box is a rather clunky way to scale items, but a tiny floating palette offers a quick way to apply current settings to selections. As with Cropster, you can store settings for reuse later.

The biggest criticisms we can aim at ProScale relate to its manual, which refers to an out-of-date version of the software. Despite some glitches, ProScale and Cropster offer decent value. However, for their combined price, you'd be better off picking up Gluon's $219 (about £154) bundle, ProPack 8, which includes both XTensions and more than a dozen others, including tools for making contact sheets, tables and all kinds of shapes.