7.0

Creating animated GIFs
Animated GIFs are an alternative way to present animated sequences in the web. An older, much
simpler technology is used, which has some advantages and some disadvantages.
An animated GIF is just a GIF file that contains a sequence of images, rather like frames in a movie.
Every Xara Web Designer 7 Premium-frame is one frame in the final animation, just like a flip-book.
The advantages:

All browsers are able to play back GIF animations out-the-box, there is no additional plug-in
necessary as with Flash animations. This results in faster loading times and higher compatibility of
your pages.

GIF animation are used as normal images, there is no additional HTML code necessary as when
embedding Flash animations.
The disadvantages:

Animated GIFs don't 'tween' between the frames. This means, the frames of your Xara Web
Designer 7 Premium-animation are translated 1:1 in resulting GIF frames. If you want to phase
smooth animations like in Flash you have to provide a lot of frames.

GIF is a Bitmap format and not a vector format like Flash. It produces far larger output files even
for simple geometric forms or text.

The maximum color depth is 256 colors.

Advanced Flash features like sequence flow (stop/goto), URL linking or acceleration are not
available.
Nevertheless and thanks to their simplicity Animated GIFs are still very popular for advertising banners
or as avatar image in forums or instant messengers.
Opening an animation document
To create an animated GIF, you must first open an animation document. To do this choose "File" > "
New" > "Animation". You will then have access to the Frame Gallery
.
Creating the animation
To create an animated GIF:
1.
Choose "Utilities" > "Galleries" > "Frame Gallery", or click the Frame Gallery icon on
the Galleries toolbar.
2.
Draw what you want to appear in this first frame.
3.
In the Frame Gallery, click New to create the next frame.
4.
Set the background and overlay flags as required.
5.
Create the objects you want to appear in this frame.
6.
Repeat steps 3 through 5 until you have built up the sequence of frames.
Exporting the animation
To save the animation, choose "File" > "Export Animation"
.
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