Professional Indexes in QuarkXPress
Vision’s Edge’s IndeXTension ($99) is a professional indexing XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 that allows you to mark words or phrases in multiple documents, and then generate an index from those marked words.
Faster and more advanced than the indexing feature built into QuarkXPress, IndeXTension lets you mark all occurrences of an entry at once, or load a list of keywords for automatic marking. It recognizes proper names and titles and alphabetizes them appropriately. You can also tell it to group entires into categories, so that they appear under that category in the index, in addition to their own entry.
If you’re creating an index for a project in QuarkXPress, this is the tool to get.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
Hello,
We will be revising our 700 page architectural price book. It contains thousands of part and extrusion number entries. Previous designers have manually created an index in Excel. If we purchased the IndexTension software shown above, how well can it manage a large number of entries? Does it require manually placing index markers as in QuarkXpress 4? Or – I am hoping – can it read a text file listing of parts, and locate them in the book?
Thank you for your time!
Demoed Vison’s Edge IndexTension as I had a very large catalog to index and wanted something to compare to Quark’s (version 8) indexing. The trouble I had with VE’s IndexTension is that (manually or automatically) the items to be indexed would highlight correctly but oftentimes the index markers would break the item apart (leaving one or two digits outside of the end marker) requiring you to manually go back and fix. I did check for invisible issues within the items to be indexed that might have caused this issue, but could not find anything amiss with the data.
The biggest frustration is that I emailed Vision’s Edge TWICE regarding the above and hoping for advice before making a purchase decision, but never received a response, and therefore they lost a sale on me.
I have used Vision’s Edge Since 2000 for indexing in Quark with great success. However, two years ago we upgraded to Quark 7 and I purchased the upgrade for IndexTension. I have never been able to get the upgrad to work with Quark 7 and have had to save my 600 page catalog back to 6.5 in order the get the book indexed. To date, after trying by phone and email so many times that I have lost count, I have not been able to contact or have not had a response from IndexTension. They managed to swap several emails during the purchase phase of the upgrade, but after that they seem to have dropped off the face of the earth. On several times with earlier Quark versions, I was able to talk with Dacques Vike, the creator of IndexTension, and we resolved the minor problems, but as of today they have been no help on the upgrade for Quark 7. If my name was connected to a product like this and my customers were being ripped off, I would be very embarassed and ashamed.
DO NOT BUY INDEXTENSION!!!!!!
Must agree with previous comments. This extension is a total rip-off. It simply does not work in any usable fashion in Quark 8, will not hold preference settings, and keeps bombing my Quark. Can get no response from Vision Edge. Have wasted hours testing it on different machines with the same useless results. Don’t waste your money. This is some sort of criminal rip-off. I am now stuck with having to back save my files from Quark 8 to Quark 4 to be able to generate an index (at least the old version in 4 works fine.
DO NOT BUY. RUBBISH AND A TOTAL WASTE OF MONEY
I’m sorry to hear all of these reports… I’ve tried to contact them myself, and have received no replies either. We certainly won’t be mentioning any Vision’s Edge XTensions again unless they begin to respond to customers.