Review: MarkzTools 7
- Article 6 of 16
- Macworld, February 2007
MarkzTools is useful in theory but flawed in practice
On the face of it, Markzware’s MarkTools 7 sounds like a vital XTension for QuarkXPress 7 users. It claims to be able to prevent all kinds of disasters. With it installed, XPress will verify saved documents so you’ll know if their integrity is suspect. A special temp file will let you recover documents that have become corrupted during a save operation. If your document has already become corrupted, you can try to salvage what you can, the entire layout if you’re lucky, just the text if you’re not. You can convert full-colour previews into grey pictures then back again to save space on your hard drive. The last big attraction is its backwards conversion tool: it can convert Quark documents to version 4.1 format.
Installation is a relatively simple manual process that involves unstuffing a .sit archive and dragging it to Quark’s XTensions folder. The XTension is PowerPC-only so you’ll need to run Quark in Rosetta or on a PowerPC Mac to get it to load. Markzware say they are working on a Universal version. Documentation is available online, although at the time of writing, it hadn’t been updated for version 7 – again, Markzware said they were still working on it. The XTension is relatively self-explanatory, however, although “Convert Documents…” was still mystifying, even with the help of the manual, since it did nothing of the sort.
Unfortunately, MarkzTools just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. Document verification and the interim save function seemed to work fine, and although it slows up the save process considerably, it never actually damaged a document. The picture preview function, when it worked, did everything as advertised, although it would frequently refuse to do as bidden. The salvage functions are crude, never recovering a layout completely, even with undamaged files. The text recover function was able to extract text from all the documents we threw at it, although non-Roman characters were garbled.
However, the option to save Quark documents as earlier versions just didn’t work. All the documents converted, no matter how simple, crashed Quark 5, 6.5 and 7. MarkzTools has been around for some time and has had many of its features in previous versions, so hopefully, fixes will be forthcoming to bring version seven back on track.