Planet Quark

Axaio’s remarkable MadeToPrint is now available for QuarkXPress 8, in addition to 5, 6 and 7. This XTension lets you combine all the settings for a particular printing job into a selectable item: printer, Page Setup, PDF, EPS and Print settings. This lets you (or an inexperienced coworker) easily print the same document to a laser printer, color proofer, or imagesetter, and export to PDF or EPS with all the correct settings. You can even make a group of settings for several different printers, and send a document to all the printers at once — or to a printer and simultaneously to PDF or EPS.

A batch-printing feature lets you assign a presets to a folder, then drag a QuarkXPress document into that folder to automatically output it using that preset. You can also optionally break a print job into separate pages, to print long documents that may otherwise choke or slow down the printer.

When creating a PDF, you can access Distiller’s settings from within the Print dialog box. MadeToPrint can also generate a job slug or a new name for the output file based on several variables including date & time, user, page(s), and last modification date & time.

MadeToPrint costs 349 euros.