With CopyFit Desktop for QuarkXPress or InDesign you may find yourself with time on your hands!

With CopyFit Desktop for QuarkXPress or InDesign you may find yourself with a lot more time on your hands!

The power of the CopyFit Desktop XTension for QuarkXPress or plug-in for InDesign in handling overset and underset text isn’t readily apparent from just a brief product description. CopyFit is designed to detect and remedy overset (or underset) text conditions in any QuarkXPress or InDesign document. The automation and time savings it offers over manually dealing with these issues is amazing, to say the least.

It adds a new option under the Window menu of QuarkXPress’ or InDesign’s interface called Show CopyFit Palette. The Fit pop-up is used to specify which boxes you want to copy fit. You can select Box to fit a single, currently selected box; select All to fit all boxes in the current document; or select Tagged to fit only those boxes that you’ve tagged with the Tag Box option. CopyFit then provides three different Methods of copy fitting: Shrink to fit, Expand to fit, and Either method. Choosing the Shrink to fit option will change only overset boxes and ignore underset ones, whereas the Expand to fit option will change only underset boxes. 

CopyFit has its own custom find feature that can be utilized to find boxes that are overset in your document(s). Just click the Find First button, sit back for a moment (but only a moment), and have CopyFit scan your document and locate the first overset box. Here, I should note, you can set a CopyFit preference to ignore any box whose overflowing text consists only of non-printing characters such as spaces or returns if you choose.

CopyFit provides six different text-formatting attributes that can be applied in order to copy fit a box: Tracking, Horizontal Scaling, Point Size, Leading, Space Before (a paragraph), and Space After (a paragraph). To utilize a CopyFit formatting attribute, you just tick the box next to that attribute. Each attribute has a Minimum and Maximum allowable adjustment value, as well as a Step amount (the amount by which a particular attribute will be increased or decreased) in order to fit the text. CopyFit also provides the option of “remembering” these changed attribute settings by selecting the Update Set button, so you can easily use them again in the future. Handily, each formatting attribute can also be assigned a priority to determine the order in which its specified adjustment will be applied allowing you to basically “customize” CopyFit to your particular needs. 

Finally, just choose a CopyFit Style to tell the XTension or plug-in how to apply your preferred formatting attributes. The Looping option is considered the slowest process, or method. But is the one that generally provides the best results. With this option, CopyFit uses a methodology most similar to what you—the designer—would use when trying to copy fit a box manually. This style applies one adjustment for the first priority attribute you’ve set up to the text in a box. If the text does not fit, CopyFit increments the first priority attribute by its step amount and then applies the new adjustment to the text. That procedure continues until the text fits or the specified Maximum/Minimum for that attribute is met. If the text still requires fitting, CopyFit will automatically start over. This time, however, CopyFit applies one adjustment of the second priority attribute you’ve set up, and then applies successive adjustments of the first priority attribute in increments until the text fits or until the specified range is exceeded. All of this happens very quickly.

The One at a time method tries each of your selected attributes one at a time, in succession, always resetting that attribute in the text to its original value if it finds that adjusting the attribute fails to fit the box.

The Cumulative method is the fastest copy fit style. It’s similar to the One At a time style, except that the effects of prior attributes are not reverted after each attempt. Each attribute will be applied, in turn, until the text fits in the box or until all attributes fall outside of their ranges that you specified. There is also an option to use “some” of each of the options, which applies—successively—one incremental adjustment of each of the attributes to the text. CopyFit then continues to cycle through the attributes until the text fits or until all attributes fall outside of the ranges.

CopyFit includes 10 CopyFit sets that you can easily customize, allowing you to reuse specific combinations of Formatting Adjustments, Priorities, Methods, and Styles, again saving you time. You can use CopyFit’s Tag Box feature to store particular CopyFit settings with a specific box, and any text box can be assigned its own custom CopyFit settings.

CopyFit can also be set up to automatically check for overset conditions whenever you Save, Print, or Save as EPS, and it will let you know whenever overset or underset conditions are found. Both the XTensions module and the plug-in offer an affordable alternative to manual copyfitting and traditional typesetting systems. CopyFit handles your copyfitting needs quickly, intelligently and completely hands off once your specifications are chosen. And that just might leave you time for something other than work as well as releasing you from your monotonous copyfitting demands.