Use Slideshows to Create Animations

Tue, Jul 31, 2012

Digital Publishing, Tip

When you’re creating a digital publication in QuarkXPress, you may want to include an animation.

One way to do that is to save a series of images from your favorite image-editing program (or even a series of pages in a QuarkXPress document!), then add them all to a slideshow in QuarkXPress. For example, you may have an animated GIF already made, so just save each frame as a separate image file, drop them all into a slideshow box in QuarkXPress, set the duration of each slide to a small amount and voilà — an animation!

Here’s how: first create a picture box on the page. Then:

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With the picture box selected, choose Item> Digital Publishing> App Studio:

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Click the Slideshow button:

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Choose Simple Slideshow (Slideshow with Thumbnails adds a navigation bar for the user, which you probably don’t want in an animation):

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Decide whether to import a folder of images into the slideshow, or to import pages of another QuarkXPress layout as your “slides”. Note that you can either create a new QuarkXPress layout, or link to an existing QuarkXPress layout:

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Click the Create the Slideshow button, and you’ll see this dialog box:

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Click the File button to see the dialog below. navigate to your folder of images and Command-click (Ctrl-click) on all the images you want to include in your slideshow:


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Click the Open button, and you’ll see the dialog below. You can click through each image and Crop it, add a Caption, or assign an Action.

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But you don’t need to do any of that. Just click the Slideshow tab. There, assign a Transition Duration of “0” (so that each image appears all at once after the previous image), and set a short Image Duration (try 100ms to 400ms).

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That’s it! when you export your publication from App Studio, your images will play like a short movie.

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This post was written by:

- who has written 1454 posts on Planet Quark.

Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.

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2 Responses to “Use Slideshows to Create Animations”

  1. Annemarie Arnold Says:

    Please help – my Blio book will not show the interactive media: slides, video. Thanks

  2. Jay Nelson Says:

    Annemarie: I think you’ll need to contact Quark for support…

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