Planet Quark

Have you ever wished for a way to intelligently resize a bunch of page items without squishing them, and without scaling things that shouldn’t be scaled? Well, the geniuses at Gluon came up with a solution many years ago, and named it ProScale.

ProScale is as an XTension for QuarkXPress 4/5/6/7 that lets you resize an entire multipage DOCUMENT with complete control over what gets scaled, and how. For example, you can scale all the pages of a document, including the text, but maintain rule and/or frame sizes.

The options are almost limitless. You can scale pages non-proportionally, while maintaining the proportions of page items — and the results are very close to what a designer would have chosen. You can use it to quickly fit an entire ad to a new column width. Seriously.

For convenience, ProScale includes a “Fit To” pop-up menu with common sizes such as A4, A5, business card, 1/3 page, 1/2 page, letter size, tabloid size, etc. (It’s great for converting letter-size to A4 and vice-versa!)

Its other options let you scale from the center of a selection, and step-and-repeat your scaling — perfect for logo sheets.

Once you get a combination of settings that you like, you can save them as a preset to reuse in the future.

I’ve been astonished by the results we’ve achieved in our office. If for nothing other than its awe factor, I encourage you to take a look at the examples at Gluon’s website: www.gluon.com

By the way, you can also use ProScale the old-fashioned way: just click and drag selected items to a new size.

And one more thing: ProScale is extremely fast, and it lets you undo the scaling!

ProScale costs $139 by itself, but a better bargain is Gluon’s ProPack, which includes ProScale and 17 more incredibly useful XTensions for just $199.

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