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From: pgeorge@solomon.technet.sg (George Philip)
Newsgroups: comp.publish.cdrom.software
Subject: iView and iTools (Multimedia Publishing)
Date: 24 May 1994 00:45:30 GMT
Organization: Technet, Singapore
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WRITE-UP ON IVIEW AND ITOOLS
----------------------------

WHAT IS IVIEW ?
---------------
iView is an application for viewing page-oriented multimedia 
publications. Its most noticeable feature is the animated page turn, 
where both sides of a page are visible at the same moment. Enhancing the 
animation's realism is a sound effect of the turning page. Other features 
of iView are a layout which replaces the usual buttons and pull-down 
menus with directional borders, and an active cursor, both providing 
navigational cues.

iView publications must be created using a multimedia authoring tool 
known as iTools, being developed by iMedia to meet the needs of desktop 
publishing in the 90's. iTools will include both automatic text indexing, 
and definition of hypertext links, such as those needed to jump from a 
contents page to a specific topic. iTools will be available to selected 
publishers in a beta-release program from October 94, and to end-users 
beginning in January 95.


HOW DOES iTOOLS WORK ?
----------------------
iTools will support a package known as Common Ground from No Hands 
Software, Inc., one of the leading providers of 'portable document' 
technology. Using Common Ground, a publisher will output files from their 
page layout software (eg- PageMaker or QuarkXpress) into 'portable 
document' files. No Hands calls these files Digital Paper (a trademark), 
or dimply 'DP'.

iTools software has the ability to stitch together a variety of media 
objects, including page layouts in the form of portable documents. iTools 
will directly read the native DP files created by Common Ground. These 
files contain not only page layout images, they contain document text as 
well. iTools will be capable of automatically indexing this text.

Once DP files have been imported into an iView publication, iTools 
provides page layout capabilities not present in even high-end DTP 
applications:

-  define a master template (eg-indicating page number position)
-  place (any size of) multimedia objects in the pages
-  capture keyframes for video and animation clips
-  anti-alias selected images, and generate a standard palette
-  define article (or chapter) and section breaks
-  create hypertext links (eg- from the table of contents)
-  script the order for automatic playback of multimedia objects

The result of using iTools is a publication file which can be browsed 
with iView.

To summarize, the process of creating a publication with iTools is:

STEP #1: Layout & create a portable document
STEP #2: Import the document into an iView publication
STEP #3: Index text, add multimedia, and mix color palette


-------------------------- The End -----------------------------