InReview: Productivity Enhancers
Figure 5: You can increase the width and height of the pasteboard
beyond InDesign’s default sizes.
(Override Master Page Size)—Page Control is an an air-conditioner to an Eskimo, or it’ll be hook-
impressive product that adds a powerful capability ware—as in, you’ll get a glimpse at its great
to InDesign. It also closes a major feature gap with potential, but to really get that potential, you’ll
QuarkXPress and it does so at a reasonable price. need to step up and buy the full version. I can
confidently say, I’ve never been more wrong.
What Is AutoFit?
John Cruise (cruisejohn@qwest.net) is a Denver-based
writer, teacher, trainer, and Adobe-certified InDesign
Typéfi develops and distributes Typéfi Publish, a suite
expert. He has co-authored several books about page of applications that automates composition, layout,
In addition to resizing document and master
layout software and writes articles and software reviews for
and pagination across an organization, such as a large
several publications. His most recent book, Adobe InDesign
pages within a single document, Page Control
CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques, was coauthored by
publisher. The AutoFit plug-in is a core component of
also lets you drag and drop different-sized pages Kelly Kordes Anton and published by Adobe Press. the much larger Typéfi Publish system.
between documents—very useful for combining At its most basic, AutoFit enables “soft bottom” text
previously created documents of different sizes. frames—frames that automatically expand or shrink to
Page Control is not compatible with InDesign’s AutoFit fit their content. That alone is worth the time to install
Export as InDesign Interchange (.inx) feature. Typéfi this free plug-in, but AutoFit can do so much more.
If you export a document with multiple page www.typefi.com You can also use the plug-in to automatically
sizes as an .inx file, all pages in the resulting file Free balance columns of a multi-column frame, which
are the same size (that is, the size of the Width Mac and Windows; CS, CS2, and CS3 many InDesign users have requested for years.
and Height displayed in the Document Setup Rating: And, most impressively, you can create dynamic
dialog box). DTP Tools has said that .inx support relationships between objects on a page.
will be added to a forthcoming dot release. By JAMIE MCKEE For instance, you can create a spatial relationship
It’s also worth mentioning that DTP Tools tech between an image and its caption so that, no matter
support was quick to answer several questions When Typéfi announced the free release of their what size you make the image, the caption always
about Page Control and also quick to fix a handful AutoFit plug-in back in July, the press release said, stays in the same relative position—say, one pica
of small glitches that came up during my testing. “Every time we demoed Typéfi Publish at an InDesign below the bottom edge of the image. If your art
User Group event, we’d have designers clamoring for director tells you that an image has to shrink by 50%,
The Final Word us to sell Typéfi AutoFit stand-alone. Because it’s just you simply resize the image, and AutoFit takes care of
Other than the few shortcomings mentioned that useful we’ve decided to release it free.” moving your caption frame to the new location—still
earlier—no documentation, no .inx support, the I don’t know about you, but when I read one pica below the bottom edge of the image!
inability to automatically align facing pages at the top something like that, I hear warning bells in my Or let’s say a sidebar accompanies your main
or bottom, and one somewhat confusing command head… Either it’s going to be about as useful as text, and the thick rule that separates the two text
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