K4 Caption & Credit

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Permalink Reply by Sachin Ghodke on September 29, 2008 at 11:00pm

Not many use this plug-in. You know not many know of Maned (MEI) Products. I was researching for some similar tools last year because we were planning to develop one for the publishing industry. Apparently K4 is advanced and has years of development behind it. Unfortunately not many know or use it. But to my knowledge its one of the few really good tools for publishing editorial work flow. What exactly are you looking for or want to know about K4 Caption & Credit? Do you want to know how best to use it? Or what the user's experiences are?

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Permalink Reply by David Cardillo on October 2, 2008 at 12:14pm

Kathy, I don't know if I'll be able to help - it's been 2+ years since I've used K4, though I helped set up the implementation of QPS at a previous job.

One thing you really need to look at (though I'm sure it goes without saying) is the cost/benefit ratio. I am constantly downloading and installing plug-ins, scripts and 3rd party applications (just don't tell my IT staff, they don't know I rooted my machine), anything that I think will alleviate the tedium of some tasks. Many of them I find myself just not using - I need their feature set so rarely, or they're of limited benefit, or the learning curve is so great that I can't remember how to use them, if I even remember I installed them at all.

Then there's trying to get other people to use them. Better to get them to loan you $20 for lunch. It doesn't matter if you see the benefit or feel it would save time if no one else does. (the plug-ins, not lunch) And it doesn't matter if you lock it down and force people to use them - they will find ways around using the thing they see as getting in the way. (I can't tell you the number of times a designer pulled all the copy to the pasteboard because they couldn't check out the article to restyle it, or an editor resaved a checked out layout so they could make a text box bigger.)

Is this something people at your company have been clamoring for? Do you have production people lamenting tedious and time-consuming tasks, or inadvertently introducing errors, and proclaiming, "thank the gods, there's a plug-in that does all this for me?" Perhaps you have your answer in the fact that no one, until now, has answered the question.

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