QuarkImmedia

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On: 2020-09-14 18:22:32
Updated by: InkBlot
On: 2023-07-01 12:48:23
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What is QuarkImmedia?

Print designers who are considering going back to school to learn how to design for multimedia are bound to appreciate QuarkImmedia, a new authoring tool from the company that gave us the popular high-end DTP package QuarkXPress. QuarkImmedia is an XTension (Quark's term for its plug-ins) that lets you transform QuarkXPress pages into multimedia projects benefiting from the sophisticated typography and layout control QuarkXPress users swear by. This approach lets designers use page-layout-style tools to create multimedia and Internet: projects, and QuarkXPress users will take to it like ducks to water.

QuarkImmedia has two parts: a design tool and a viewer. On CD-ROMs and kiosks, the viewer simply lets the user interact with the QuarkImmedia project; on the Internet, the free viewer — available for download from Quark’s Web site... — is a bit more than that. Unlike Macromedia Shockwave, QuarkImmedia's viewer isn't a browser plug-in. Instead, it works as a helper application — you can configure your browser to switch automatically to the viewer when it encounters a QuarkImmedia page.

A Familiar Face

QuarkImmedia's design tool is an authoring environment based on the familiar QuarkXPress interface. QuarkImmedia adds new menu items and a palette that lets vou turn your pages into multimedia or Web projects, complete with interactive dements, sound, video, and animation. Herein lies the advantage of QuarkImmedia: by sticking with the QuarkXPress page-layout interface, Quark makes it easy for print designers to leap into multimedia without having to learn a whole new set of skills required by programming-oriented authoring packages such as Macromedia's Director or Audiorware programs.

As a QuarkXPress user with experience assembling print pages, I liked using Quarklmmedia's design tool to assemble multimedia projects in a familiar way; combining advanced page-layout tools — such as precise typographic controls, master pages, style sheets, libraries, and keyboard shortcuts — with the ability to add QuickTime movies, sound, hot text, and interactive buttons.

For this review, I built an interactive QuarkImmedia project and found the process remarkably like laying out a page. Instead of opening a new page, I simply opened a new project and built its basic parts using QuarkXPress text and picture boxes. Then I used the new QuarkImmedia features to make certain areas of the page hot, to add multistate (on/off) buttons, and to add other interactive features. From start to finish, it took just a few hours. The process was nearly as easy as laying out a brochure.

Web Pages, Hot off the Press

Although you can use the QuarkImmedia design tool to create multimedia projects for CD-ROMs or kiosks, it's far more interesting as a Web design cool. QuarkImmedia designers can create intricate Web pages that are considerably more stunning than typical cyberfare.

Proving that it's more than just another me-too player in the cybermedia world, QuarkImmedia includes tools for tackling bandwidth issues. For example, you can specify when the QuarkImmedia viewer should download a particular multimedia element. Likewise, you can select from a range of compression algorithms for sound, including one that converts stereo to mono, cutting the size of the file virtually in half.

Unlike other Web-page extensions to QuarkXPress, such as Astrobyte's BeyondPress or HexMac's HexWeb XT..., QuarkImmedia doesn't convert QuarkXPress pages to HTML code. Instead, it avoids the design constraints of HTML, particularly the annoying ones that constrict the typography on a typical Web page.

Although it’s true that this approach means a user needs to download the free viewer in order to see a QuarkImmedia page over the Internet, the advantages for designers outweigh the minor inconvenience of having to put yet another browser-type application on your bard drive. One example: you can configure projects created in QuarkImmedia to take control of the user's entire screen, not just the window you see in typical browser applications. For another, designers who develop projects in QuarkImmedia can precisely control the typography on their Web pages; type is antialiased and rasterized upon export so it looks the same on any platform, regardless of the fonts available on the receiving computer. (QuarkImmedia doesn't, however, rasterize type in editable text fields, like those in forms designed to receive user-entered information.)

One fairly significant drawback to QuarkImmedia's proprietary format is that its pages do not work with the America Online or CompuServe Web browsers, since these providers use dynamic IP addresses instead of the unique ones that QuarkImmedia requires.

The Last Word

Experienced print designers will be very comfortable with QuarkImmedia, a product that proves it's possible to make the jump from print to multimedia without learning a whole new set of skills. Salty old Webmasters — those who cut their teeth on HTML code — will take more convincing and, because they will have to begin by learning how to use QuarkXPress, will have a steeper learning curve to climb.

Assadi, Barbara. (December 1996). QuarkImmedia. Macworld. (pg. 57).


Download QuarkImmedia for Mac

(86.21 KiB / 88.28 KB)
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(375.26 MiB / 393.49 MB)
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Architecture


68K + PPC (FAT)



Compatibility notes


Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II





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