Xdata 2.5 is a new version of the best-selling XTension that brings the full typographic and picture publishing power of QuarkXPress to bear on all your data-driven repetitive publishing tasks: catalogues, directories, form letters, financial summaries, tables, labels, lists of all sorts, and more. Completely integrated with XPress, Xdata automatically formats data exported from your Macintosh or PC database and spreadsheet applications, or downloaded from your corporate information systems, freeing you from endless manual formatting. Xdata can also import related pictures (of any type supported by XPress) into boxes anchored in the textual data.
Xdata is easy to use. In your database or spreadsheet application, select and sort the data to be published, exporting it in standard raw ASCII format (comma- or tab-delimited). In XPress, create a "template" for your prototypical record, including placeholders for each field-e.g., «name»-formatted in any fashion. Select "Import from file..." from the Xdata menu in XPress, choose the data file, and press Start in the Xdata control panel. Xdata does the rest, completely "hands off."
Xdata gives you complete control. Xdata has a powerful English-like scripting language that lets you include or exclude fields, pictures and static text, based on the value of one or more fields in the current or previous record. Thus, you can create sophisticated record templates that apply different formats to a field, based on its or another field's value, e.g., causing a page break or formatting a major heading in reverse type, given a change of value indicating a new section or subsection.
For industrial-strength publishing, Xdata places no limits on your data: records and fields can be as many and as long as you need, within the overall limits of XPress documents. Xdata can create multiple, independent "dictionary-style" headers and footers on each page or spread, with sophisticated controls over the header/footer contents.
Xdata 2.5 is scriptable with AppleScript and Frontier, for automation of large, complex jobs involving multiple imports in multiple documents.
Xdata is risk free, with a 60-day unconditional money-back guarantee of satisfaction. Xdata 2.5 works with QuarkXPress versions 3.1 through 3.3. It comes with a 200-page manual containing over 50 pages of thorough tutorials, and includes many useful templates and examples on disk.
