Publication date: March 13, 2007

Quark Inc. announced today that Quark XPert Tools Pro for QuarkXPress 7 will be posted on the Quark website the week of April 2 as a free download.

This collection of XTensions was formerly developed by Alap, a company that was acquired by Quark in 2005. Over the years, many designers purchased and came to rely on these powerful XTensions in their workflows, each of which can be enabled or disabled, so you don't have to add all their features. The XTensions are:

• XPert Align: Click a button to align or distribute selected items in relation to each other or to the page.

• XPert BoxTools: Easily adjust a box to fit a picture, or adjust text to fit a box, with control over whether the box changes width or height. You can also align a picture to any edge of a picture box, and create a new picture box from an existing clipping path or runaround path. It also lets you nudge or rotate items a specific amount, and Ungroup All the items in a nested Group.

• XPert FindChange: Find and change almost any attribute of every item throughout a Layout -- color, opacity, frame style, blend colors, box shape, line width, picture scale, angle, position, number of columns, suppressed printing, text inset, gutters, and more.

• XPert Guides: Lets you numerically create and edit guides, gutters and grids, as well as copy, move and mirror guides, and import and export sets of guides. You can even drag a set of guides to the desktop and then use them on another page by dragging them back onto the page from the desktop. You can control each guide's color, whether it applies to a page or a spread, and the view percentage at which it displays. You can create guides around a box, and create a grid of guides from within a box. You can also add bleed and safety guides. To edit a guide's position, just double-click it.

• XPert ImageInfo: Displays detailed information about any picture in a layout. You can also edit attributes of the picture, and see any cropped area. It can also generate a detailed report of all pictures in a layout.

• XPert ItemStyles: Assign "styles" to items, for quick formatting and even quicker global changes. Attributes can include color, frame style, line width, picture scale, text inset, and more. You can also base item styles on other item styles, and import and export styles for use in other projects.

• XPert Layers: Included to support earlier versions of XPert Tools, as well as other XTensions that added Layers to earlier versions of QuarkXPress. It also lets you easily navigate among linked text boxes.

• XPert PageSets: Lets you save combinations of settings for a New Project or Layout for easy reuse. It lets you specify the number of pages, the dimensions, margins, number of columns, section start, and name.

•XPert Paste: Lets you copy and paste items in the same position from where it came, onto multiple pages at once.

• XPert Pilot: Shows large, navigable thumbnails of every page, and provides a slider to set the View percentage and gives an easy way to jump to other pages.

• XPert Print: Select an area of a page to print or export to an EPS file. Also export multiple pages or spreads as EPS files.

• XPert Scale: Lets you scale groups of items, either visually or numerically, with control over which items and attributes get scaled and how (proportionally or not). It also adds a Flexo panel to the Print dialog box, to easily print nonproportionally.

• XPert TextLink: Adds an intuitive palette for linking and unlinking text boxes and text paths, and also joining chains and duplicating and deleting text boxes in a chain.

• XPert Toolbars: Create custom palettes for quick access to any combination of QuarkXPress menu items or tools. Create different palettes for different tasks, such as typography, pictures and layout.

• XPert Type: Quickly apply text formatting: you can increase or decrease values by clicking Up or Down arrows, and interactively apply changes by dragging type, paragraphs, or rules. Change size, tracking, leading, indents, drop caps, and more.

To learn more about QuarkXPress 7 or to download a fully functional 30-day evaluation version, visit Quark's website at www.quark.com/seven.