Astrobyte's BeyondPress 3.0

Emedia Professional, May, 1998 by Ron Gustavson

In Redesigning Print for the Web, Dr. Mario R. Garcia elaborates on the challenges that face graphic designers as they move print publications to the Web. These challenges range from layout details such as choice of fonts, image resolution, and color depth, to designing information in an appropriate manner for online presentation. While the online version of a print product will likely use elements of the original, it is a different creature. One software tool that targets the graphic designers responsible for these transformations--at least those using QuarkXPress--is BeyondPress 3.0, from Denver, Colorado-based Astrobyte, LLC.

BeyondPress is a Macintosh extension to QuarkXPress that provides HTML output from Quark for traditional graphic and layout artists. By allowing these print-oriented folk to create Web sites in a desktop environment that is already part of their familiar production cycle and practice, Astrobyte introduces a large group of talented professionals to Web development in a manner that leverages their print experience in producing consistent, polished publications. Employing templates, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and converted graphic and multimedia elements, BeyondPress achieves a clear transition from print to the Web.

BEYOND PICA, PIXEL

Using BeyondPress within Quark frees graphic designers from having to worry about HTML text--sort of. In reality, it is likely that Beyond Press-produced pages will require manual tuning. This is true of all WYSIWYG HTML editors and not really a drawback when balanced against the graphical richness of QuarkXPress and the ease with which Web sites can be built by professional designers in a busy print environment. Also for many BeyondPress projects, only original templates will need to be tested and fine-tuned; actual content can then be dragged into the templates as needed.

The program's Convert Everything extension enables BeyondPress users to translate any file that is Quark-compatible into HTML; embedded or inlined GIFs and JPEGs can also be edited within its menus. Additionally, GIF animations, Quicktime movies, and Java Applets can be dragged directly into Quark. Quark's "point" measurement is translated to one pixel.

For handling white space, BeyondPress relies on tables and a 1 X 1 pixel GIF image to create margins and blank lines as in this HTML excerpt:

While anathema to SGML purists, this type of layout scheme is common in many WYSIWYG HTML editors.

By converting QuarkXPress style sheets into CSS style sheets, BeyondPress makes it easy for users to apply specific formatting to Web pages that retain the look and feel of a print publication. And because BeyondPress can base Web pages on saved templates, developers can maintain a consistent appearance across the entire site. One BeyondPress feature provides easy conversion of a text box or group of Quark elements into a GIF. This can be used wherever there is text that follows a curve or path, or for any text that is beyond the abilities of CSS, as interpreted by the two major browsers.

BEYOND QUARK: EXPORTING TO THE WEB

QuarkXPress users will adapt to BeyondPress with ease. The BeyondPress extension adds only two new windows to the familiar Quark interface. The Elements window provides three libraries for images, custom HTML inserts, and multimedia files. Within these libraries, images can be renamed, converted, or scaled, and custom HTML inserts and comments can be edited and saved. The multimedia library can store GIF animations, Quicktime movies, and Java applets, as well as any other file format. Clicking on any of these objects will bring up the appropriate "Inspector" palette, where attributes and par-ameters can be altered. This allows a very consistent site to be built from reusable objects that only need to be downloaded once.

The other new window is Document Content, which contains BeyondPress' two modes of Web creation: Authoring and Conversion. In Authoring mode, QuarkXPress is used to produce pages in a WYSIWYG environment. Traditional changes and replacements can be made within Quark and saved to the traditional Quark format, or exported to an EPS file. One benefit of extending Quark with BeyondPress is that objects can now be dragged and dropped into the Quark page layouts. The icons in Authoring mode allow image examination, hyperlink insertion of any highlighted text or element, conversion to HTML, inspection of page or section attributes, and a link to the user manual for online help.

Conversion mode provides a list of each Web page with the text boxes, image elements, or other media contained within, appearing as folders. Clicking once on these folders brings up a drop-down box for quick formatting, while double-clicking brings up an attributes box for editing style details or parameters for each element. This box provides the most control over HTML configuration. Besides converting the whole page, each element can be converted to HTML for quick display in a Web browser, giving the designer a view of the impact of his or her work.