Release: Xdata 6/7/8.4.2 for QuarkXPress 6/7/8

January 19, 2011 by car

This release adds unfettered anchored box sizing, adds support for Arabic publishing, text anchors and hyperlinks, and includes a number of minor fixes.

Changes

• Removed the “shrink-only” restriction on box resizing. Picture boxes positioned using “Size Box to Picture” and “Size to Fit Horizontally, then Size Box Vertically to Picture” will now shrink or grow the box as needed to fit the contained picture.
• Added support for Layout Ltd.‘s ArabicXT. (QuarkXPress 7+ only)

• Added support for embedded text anchors and hyperlinks, as well as full support for the new text anchor and hyperlink tags (via styled put). Any text anchor or hyperlink found in the prototype is replicated during data import, and if the text anchor’s name or hyperlink’s name, anchor or URL contains the name of an Xdata field or global variable, then the name, anchor or URL of the resulting anchor or hyperlink is changed to the value of the corresponding field or global variable.

  A hyperlink with no name will produce an anonymous hyperlink during the data import (so that you don’t need to come up with a unique name for each replicated hyperlink).

  For example, if you have a URL-type hyperlink in the prototype with an empty name and a URL value of “url”, and url is the name of an Xdata field containing “http://emsoftware.com” for a given record, then the hyperlink replicated in that record’s Xdata output would have its name left empty and its URL destination set to “http://emsoftware.com”.

• For Windows 7, Vista and XP users with administrative privileges, the XTension’s registration information is once again stored in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Em Software, where it will be available for all users of the machine. Registration information for users lacking administrative privileges remains in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Em Software where it will be available only to that user.
• Fixed the fithboxv picture positioning keyword, which had been misspelled in previous releases as fitboxv.
• Fixed a long-standing limitation which was causing prototypes using many large global variables to run out of memory (“[P16] This prototype is too large…”).
• Fixed a problem in QuarkXPress 8 where the missing picture’s proxy image, the big red question mark, wasn’t being scaled properly to fit its box.
• Changed the handling of missing pictures in QuarkXPress 8 because references to missing pictures were sometimes being lost and displayed as “No Disk File” in the Utilities > Usage > Pictures dialog. In versions prior to QuarkXPress 8, a reference to a missing picture was always retained exactly as it was specified. Now, on Mac OS, a full path to a missing picture (“Macintosh HD:Users:me:Pictures:cat.jpg”, for example) is retained only if each folder in the path actually exists. If any folder of a full path is missing, or the missing picture is specified with a partial path (like “cat.jpg” or “:Pictures:cat.jpg”), then just the picture’s filename (“cat.jpg”) is retained as being relative to either the current document, if the document has ever been saved, or the user’s home folder. On Windows, a full path to a missing picture is always retained. Partial/relative paths to missing pictures are retained as being relative to either the current document, if the document has ever been saved, or the user’s home folder.