Appendix A: Standards for Importing Graphics

Adding images to your lesson pages adds interest and enhances the learning.  You should try to add images to most if not all your pages, rather than creating pages with just blocks of text that are not visually stimulating or exciting for the student.

Image Sizes

Wherever possible, you should try to import images into Kallidus® 6 Author, exactly as you want them to appear on the page.  Avoid using the image resizing options in Kallidus to change the size of the image, as the image quality will be compromised.

The physical size of the editable page, in pixels, is 525x690.  It follows then that any image you want to import should not be larger than this.  Although it is possible to do this, it is bad practice, as you may be increasing the size of your lesson (and the time it takes to load pages) if you use unnecessarily large images.

Establish the approximate size of the image you want to appear on the page (for example, you may want an image to take up a quarter of the page), and use a professional graphics package to create the image to the required size.  For example, if you want an image to appear in a quarter of the page, you would resize the image in your graphics package to be 262x345 pixels.

Save the Image in the required size, and then import the image into Kallidus.

Image Formats

Image types allowed are Compuserve Graphics Interchange (*.GIF) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (*.JPG) types

Optimising Images for Web delivery

Creating and using images at their required page size, rather than resizing images is the best way to ensure your pages are optimised for Web delivery.  Always bear in mind when creating images that your audience may be viewing your lesson using a 56K modem connection.

The example below, shows why you should try to keep all images below 16Kb in size, and even moreso if you have more than one image appearing on a single page.

Example Image Load Times

Image Size                  Connection speed                   Load Time

16K                              56K modem                            2 seconds

16K                              64K ISDN                                1 second

16K                              128K Dual ISDN                      ½ second

100K                            56K modem                            15 seconds

100K                            64K ISDN                                7 seconds

100K                            128 Dual ISDN                        4 seconds