HexWeb XT
Internet Software
The World Wide Web keeps growing in popularity and, with no sign of a left-up in its growth rate, more people are wanting to publish their own Web pages. Many people already have the basic content they want to publish; it's just that it's in a form that cannot be placed directly on the Internet. The data is usually in the form of a QuarkXPress document - which may be a magazine, newspaper, corporate report or advertising brochure.
Currently, there are a couple of systems available for exporting XPress files to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for the World Wide Web. Most notable is Beyond Press, which was the first commercial, high-quality XTension of this sort. But now, HexWeb XT enters the field. So if you're interested in converting XPress to HTML, it's worth looking at HexWeb.
HexWeb appears as a floating tool palette which can be summoned from the Utilities menu. To export a page, all you have to do is shift-click each of the boxes you want to include in turn, and then click on "Export". Graphics are turned into JPEG's, GIFs or Interlaced GIFs (your choice), and text is mapped into the various HTML heading and body styles, depending on its size in the document - again, the exact settings can be changed from the Preferences dialog box. Attributes such as bold and italic are picked up automatically by the software, and it will even deal with dropped capitals, replacing the first letter with a GIF.
The mapping of text via size is in contrast to the approach taken by Beyond Press, which requires style sheets in your XPress documents. We found that HexWeb's approach was easier to use, especially for those of us who sre not religious about using style sheets in every XPress document.
There is reasonable control over images, including the ability to scale them by a given percentage, or specify a height and width. Creating HyperText links - either to another document or to another section of the current file - is simple; it is also possible to do a basic export very quickly. You can specify separate files as headers and footers, so "standing matter" can be included in all your pages, which is a very useful feature.
The package includes a HexWeb Index. This is a great utility if you want to create an index page for all your documents, as it does it automatically, and the results are very impressive.
HexWeb isn't perfect, but it's probably the best available. Try the demo version.
HexWeb XT
Price: �349 (exc. VAT)
Contact: XChange International, 0171-637 2966
The Mac Verdict:
A useful, effective utility for converting QuarkXPress documents into HTML.
It's not perfect, but it's the best yet.This article was released in "The Mac" magazine in march 1996.