All of Em’s plugins are now released for InDesign 2023. We released WordsFlow and DocsFlow a week ago (a day after the 2023 release itself), and released InCatalog, InData and Xtags for InDesign today.
We do appreciate your patience with us on these releases. Normally we’re ready with all of them on the day of InDesign release (we’ve even been a bit early in recent years), but these releases include wrapping up some multi-month complex engineering efforts that took us right up to, and just over the wire.
You can download these latest releases, as ever, from each product’s main page, sidebar Downloads for InDesign. Individual release notes are coming right up.
Be sure to read the section Auto-upgrades to subscriptions at the end for a very important note about using pre-2023 licenses with the new MAX 2022 (InDesign 2023) release plugins. Understanding what it says may save you time and expense.
With the upcoming plugins for InDesign 2023 that Adobe will release (as usual) at MAX 2022 (October 18th) — and for newly-released plugins under InDesign 2021 and 2022 (we only officially support the latest and 2 years back) — we are making a major change in how we license all our products. This will affect everyone going forward, so we’re giving you a heads-up a month ahead of the big change, and we will be attempting to contact every user via email, pointing to this message.
This release of Xtags adds support for QuarkXPress 2018, discontinues support for QuarkXPress 2015, and fixes a problem with the macOS Universal Clipboard.
This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2015, abandons Extension Manager CC in favor of, for now, a manual installation procedure (see below), improves file path handling, and fixes a few additional problems.
We’ve negotiated the rights with Darryl Keck to make his blockbuster Xtags book freely available, Xtags Maximized. The book has over 200 pages in 9 chapters, diving both deep and wide into using Xtags for serious production work.
To paraphrase an old proverb about justice, “the wheels of Em Software development turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”
It’s been a very long time since we’ve released any news about our XTensions for QuarkXPress 10 under Mac OS X—the Windows port was done mid-last-year—, mostly because we had no good news to share. We’re a small 4-man company, severely engineering-resource-limited (there’s really only one engineer who could do the work, Chris Roueche). The QuarkXPress 10 Mac OS XTension porting work loomed as a mountain we couldn’t really start climbing until we had cleared away some major obligations (the ports involved converting all code from Carbon to Cocoa, which is a serious change). We kept having to make tough engineering resource decisions over the past year that we judged the best for our customers overall. The end result of those decisions was a major delay affecting some of our QuarkXPress customers, and we’re sorry for that.
With this release of Xtags, we are pleased (and relieved!) to announce the addition of full support for QuarkXPress 10 on Mac OS X. Please note that with this release, our QuarkXPress 10 XTensions now require QuarkXPress 10.2 or later (both Mac OS X and Windows).
This release of Xtags adds support for QuarkXPress 10 (Windows only, for the moment), discontinues support for QuarkXPress 8, and includes minor fixes.
Pat Bensky of CatBase fame, describes how Xtags works with CatBase to produce imoderni‘s catalogs. (Also see the CatBase case study for Kellogs for another application of Xtags Pro.)
The entire document was built automatically, with minimal intervention from the user, telling InDesign to create the table of contents, for example.
(Click on the graphic to see the full pdf.)
The data is maintained in CatBase. This includes all the details, picture names and sizes, etc.
The customer selects which products to publish (e.g., all products for one manufacturer, as in the attached example; all products of a certain type, such as sofas; all products that a certain dealer sells; all products in a certain collection; etc.).
Mark Jockin, CEO of Pre1 Software in Portland, Oregon explains how Em Software’s Xtags product became a backbone of the Pre1 newspaper software sold to hundreds of publications across the Americas.
In 1999, Pre1 first sold its newspaper software to an alternative newsweekly in Portland, Oregon. Today, more than 400 titles are printed using Pre1’s SmartPublisher, with more coming online each month. By now, literally millions of ads have been converted into print. Xtags made it all possible.
Pre1’s mission is to streamline workflow for publications by integrating into one product multiple business processes vital to newspaper and magazine publishers. For the most part, every publication works the same. The sales reps sell ads, the accountants collect money, and the production department builds the ads. When deciding how to unite these various disciplines in a single software product for newspapers and magazines, Pre1’s challenge was which technologies to count on to get the job done.
This release of Xtags for InDesign adds support for InDesign CS6, officially ends support for CS4, improves compatibility with InDesign’s Smart Text Reflow and fixes an issue with the &it tag.
We’re pleased to announce that we now have server versions of our popular, field-proven data publishing solutions available for Adobe InDesign CS5 Server and Adobe InDesign CS5.5 Server.
Quark announced recently that QuarkXPress 9 is set to ship on April 26th (later this month), with a “test drive” version available until then on the Quark web site.
We’re delighted to announce that the 9.x versions of our XTensions–compatible with the final QuarkXPress 9 release–are now available from the right sidebar of this post, and from the respective product pages.
This release of Xtags for QuarkXPress adds tags for hyperlinks, a speed-up for anchored boxes and, in the server XTension, support for multiple imports into named boxes.
Here and here are a couple of articles from the University of Kent CMS blog, providing a brief overview of how they use Xtags to drive printed output in a Drupal environment, and their experience with the process.
There’s a great article on Xtags here, on the DPCI (Database Publishing Consultants, Inc.) website.
It covers a bit of history, the target audience for Xtags, gives a simple workflow example, and then talks about using the same tags for InDesign as for QuarkXPress, and the issues you might encounter.
Since we forgot to include documentation for one major new feature in our original release notes for Xtags 6/7 for InDesign CS4/CS5 (now fixed), we thought we should call attention to it separately: Xtags now boasts new tags for hyperlinks, cross-references and text anchors. See the updated release notes.
These tags have long been requested, and we’re glad to finally deliver them with this release. Let us know how they work for you.
We’re delighted to announce that both InData and Xtags for CS5 (and CS4) are now officially released, and available for download and purchase from their respective product pages:
This release of Xtags for InDesign adds support for InDesign CS5 to that for CS4 (dropping support for CS2/CS3), adds tags for hyperlinks, cross-references and text anchors, adds support for Xtags import and export through the standard InDesign place/export dialogs as well as drag’n’drop, for above-line and custom positioning of anchored frames, for anchored frame position locking, and improves missing picture handling.
This release of Xtags for InDesign adds standard white and black color names for XPress cross-compatibility, and adds more intelligent handling of non-style-applying @ characters in text (e.g., as used for email addresses).
(This release includes all release notes back to the beginning of the CS2/CS3/CS4 series.)
This set of releases includes a huge set of bug fixes, and such features XPress 8 support, XPress Server 7/8 support, as intelligent @-sign handling, improved missing picture handling, Xtags Pro (table) handling improvements, a massive performance speed-up when placing unanchored boxes (up to 10X), “version 2” variants of all the anchored box tags, new “none” box tags, box background blend support, auto-shrinking of text boxes horizontally and in the face of multiple columns, box background and frame opacity support, blends in table, row, and cell tags, and much more.
Note that this covers all releases back to the start of the XPress 6/7/8 series.
This set of releases fixes a huge range of bugs and adds improved bold/italic font handling, layer support, object-level scripting support, hierarchical styles, no-content (“none”) frames, updated anchored frame variants with more control, full runaround types on frames, translation tables, macros, tagged text output, and much more.
(This includes all release notes back to the beginning of the CS2/CS3 series.)
This set of releases includes a whole slew of bug fixes and adds many features, including additional picture box runaround type support, box placement relative to another named box, PDF page and cropping support on import, Unicode import/export in XPress 7, support for layers on box creation, and much more.
The entire document was built automatically, with minimal intervention from the user, telling InDesign to create the table of contents, for example.
In 1999, Pre1 first sold its newspaper software to an alternative newsweekly in Portland, Oregon. Today, more than 400 titles are printed using Pre1’s SmartPublisher, with more coming online each month. By now, literally millions of ads have been converted into print. Xtags made it all possible.