By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, December 12, 2007 - 6:27:00

http://www.badiasoftware.com
Score:

InDesign and QuarkXPress each come with a large set of tools and utilities, but firms like Badia can make it just a bit better or at least different. Some of Badia’s tools offer a different approach to what InDesign and QuarkXPress come with by default. Other tools, such as Big Picture and Exportools deliver new ways of doing things that you can only accomplish after some effort.

Starting with Badia Big Picture, this plug-in or XTension shows you detailed information about all the images in a document. Images can be shown in list view or thumbnail view, and the unified window that Big Picture shows you, also has search capabilities.

The information delivered ranges from EXIF data, over metadata, to plain information such as size and resolution. More importantly, Big Picture shows you the nominal resolution and the effective resolution --as you scale an image in a layout program, the resolution of the image scales with it. In some cases, this may cause problems when printing.

Badia FullMeasure: The Only XTension Doubtful in Terms of Need

Big Picture doesn’t only show you information, it also has its own abundant range of controls. For example, you can reveal the image in the document --Big Picture will take you to the image’s location for you-- or in the Finder. If you need to edit an image, you can do so with the Open with button. Updating, linking, re-linking, it’s all there. There’s even the ability to copy or move an image to a different folder than the original and re-link in the process.

Big Picture is a must-have if you create documents with lots of illustrations and photos in either InDesign or QuarkXPress. I’m not entirely convinced that Badia FullMeasure is such a must-have as well. FullMeasure is a QuarkXpress-only XTension and it sort of replaces the context-sensitive toolbar. Now, I’m perfectly happy with that toolbar, so I don’t really see the need for another approach.

Nevertheless, I must admit that the organisation of FullMeasure and the way it delivers its context-sensitive functionality is appealing. It will replace the built-in toolbar, and even offer some extras, but as I said, this one definitely is a matter of personal taste.

Exportools is a whole different story. It exists for both InDesign and QuarkXPress, and it delivers automation capabilities to the process of saving pages from a document as individual files into EPS, PDF, Postscript, Text, and JPEG. Badia let me have a go at Exportools. For your information, there is also an Exportools Pro, which has better scalability to handle more pages with even less interaction on your part.

I found Exportools to be very powerful indeed. It did what it was supposed to do, without a glitch. I was particularly weary of the Text export --how would the plug-in / XTension make out the order of the text boxes? It turned out to be quite easily: I had to first tell the program what my preferred frame order was, and it would then start to work its way through the frames in that order. I could choose to save as a single file, or every frame to its own file. I could even set it up so that each exported page would show up under a label that showed which page and spread was being started now. Even serial numbers could be set up. Very impressive.

Badia Duplica is the last tool that I received for review. Duplica makes your life a lot easier by offering copy, paste, duplication and some manipulation features for objects and attributes. It exists for QuarkXpress only, and it successfully does what InDesign users can do without it: copy and paste formatting. But it does more.

Duplica also clones boxes and lines as many times as you wish, and can do so with changing attributes --for example, lines can be duplicated applying an angle in the process. Unique to Duplica is that you can rotate and clone an item around a pivot point anywhere on a page. When used together with an offset, this enables you to rapidly create graphics as you would in Illustrator.

Badia’s tools are of excellent quality, giving you a lot of value for the money. Only the FullMeasure XTension is in my opinion somewhat of a duplicate of what is already there in QuarkXPress 7, although I’m sure there are people who think Badia’s palette is superior to Quark’s. It does offer a couple of extras, that’s for sure.