HexMac: still the way to go for more serious Quark conversion
We have been covering HexMac for quite a while now, and the company never seems to rest. The firm claims it is growing approximately 30% each quarter. We're not surprised; its products keep looking better and better. Since Nexpo a few months ago HexMac has made several enhancements to its HexWeb XT product and added to its product line.
HexWeb XT 2.2. HexWeb XT is a Quark Xpress Xtension that generates HTML files from Xpress pages, allowing you to map Xpress styles to HTML tags, apply headers and footers to pages and assign pages to different categories. HexWeb XT 2.2 is currently running only on Macintoshes, but HexMac plans to deliver a Windows 95 version in the first quarter of 1997.
Version 2.2 adds support for font colors and the new multicolumn feature of Netscape Navigator 3.0. This allows you to export any text box from QuarkXpress as multicolumn text. You can define the number of columns, the gutter width and the total width of the HTML text element.
HexWeb XT. Version 2.2 takes advantage of Netscape 3.0's support of the multicolumn HTML tag. Users can now take a columnar layout from Xpress (left) and reproduce it in HTML (right). Users can control the number of columns, the gutter width and the total width of the layout.
Plug-ins to Xpress. HexMac's new product, HexScape XT, is an Xtension bundled with HexWeb XT 2.2 to enable Xpress to support a wide range of Netscape plug-ins, such as Shockwave, Live Audio, QuickTime and WebActive. The elements can be viewed on the Xpress page or exported to HTML pages, just like normal Xpress boxes.
The new version of HexWeb XT will also support the direct uploading of files to the Internet from within Xpress using the FTP protocol.
Version 2.2 also features enhanced link checking. All hyperlinks inside your publication, image links, relational links and links to other documents can be checked with a click of a button. All missing links are shown in a palette, where you can make corrections.
Because many HexWeb XT users are newspaper and magazine publishers, HexMac has added the ability to export images and captions together in a table (one column, two rows). Users can leave the border turned off or choose to display it.
HexMac reports that about 200 publications are creating 5,000 pages per day with HexWeb XT.
For details on HexBase, HexMac's Web database system, see the next section of this report.