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.

Jay Nelson

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.