[Em General] recent releases (catch-up)

[Chris Ryland]

We've been remiss in announcing various new and important product  
releases in the past few months (if you don't watch the beta-announce  
list). I thought now would be a good time to catch up on the  
highlights of these releases, so you can get some idea of the major  
improvements going on behind the scenes here at Em Software.

Xdata (http://emsoftware.com/products/xdata/download)

* QuarkXPress 8 support
* human-friendly prototype formatting
* anchored text boxes, including auto-fitting
* anchored tables
* Excel-like formatting function 'format'
* background blends
* complete Unicode support, even in product "corners"

InData (http://emsoftware.com/products/indata/download)

* InDesign CS4 support
* human-friendly prototype formatting (no more dreaded "you can't  
change properties here" errors)

Xcatalog (http://emsoftware.com/products/xcatalog/download)

* QuarkXPress 8 support
* Pro/non-Pro versions now rolled into one XTension
* full table-tagging support (text within cells and whole cells)
* human-friendly editing in linked text (long-standing major nuisance)
* full up-to-date FileMakerPro direct access (was broken for a while)

InCatalog (http://emsoftware.com/products/incatalog/download)

* InDesign CS4 support
* full IDML import/export support for InCatalog links
* robustifications

Xtags for QuarkXPress (http://emsoftware.com/products/xtags/download)

* QuarkXPress 8 support
* massive unanchored box placement speed-up (10X)
* rotation, skew, flags and runaround for anchored boxes
* new "none content" boxes
* background blends
* auto-fitting of text boxes to width and depth, even multi-column

Xtags for InDesign (http://emsoftware.com/products/xtags/download)

* InDesign CS4 support
* translation table support
* macro support
* layer support
* hierarchical style support
* rotation, skew, flags and runaround for anchored boxes
* new "none content" boxes
* whole slew of long-standing font-handling problems fixed

Plus, all of these releases include massive smaller improvements and  
bug fixes over the past few years. I encourage you to read the release  
histories for all the details, if you're interested. It's a real eye- 
opener to see how much these products have improved over time, even if  
they don't make major news.

Cheers!
--Chris Ryland / Em Software, Inc. / www.emsoftware.com