Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
they are called by reference from the page you work on in Xara.
To declare this reference, you create a placeholder that you put
on the page—a shape of the same dimensions as the animation
file. Actually, you can work either of two ways when building a
website with animation elements:
N
Create the placeholder first, make note of its height and
width, and then build the animation, using a page size of
the same dimensions as the placeholder.
Create the animation first, note its size, and then make a
N
placeholder in the web document that matches its size.
If you create a Flash animation, the dimensions are usually
of no concern if you animate shapes that are all vectors.
However, when designing an animation to export as a GIF,
this is a bitmap animation, and unless you scale it to meet the
dimensions of the placeholder exactly, it will stretch or shrink
when your audience views it, and it won't look too good.
Although Flash animations will look clean and smooth at any size in a web page and are
typically smaller in file size than an equivalent GIF animation, Flash is not automatically
installed on computer systems nor does it come as part of web browsers. This means that
some members of your web audience won't be able to see your Flash animation until they download
the plug-in for their browser from Adobe Systems. On the other hand, 99.9% of all commercial web
browsers—Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome—play GIF animations as part of their native capability to
display graphics.
Here's how to put a placeholder on the index page for the
animating logo and make the association between the page and
the GIF file:
1.
Open the BSL logo animation.xar file as a separate
document. The most convenient way to make the
placeholder is to make a copy of one of the frames in
the BSL logo animation.xar file so you have an idea
of what is on the index page instead of guessing in the
future at a solid-filled rectangle. With the animation
file open, choose the Rectangle Tool, and then drag a
rectangle that more or less fits over the entire page. The
background in this animation is a background fill and
not a shape, so Xara cannot make a copy of it.
Give the rectangle no fill. Then with the rectangle
2.
selected, press
CTRL
-
SHIFT
-
C
to make a bitmap copy. In
the Create Bitmap options box, choose True Color from
the Color Depth drop-down list, and then click Create.
