Help with text

[Little Angel]

Hi there.
I am extremely new to web page design and would welcome your help.
Can someone tell me how to animate text eg. 3d, rotating, drop shadow. Can you do this within FP2000 or Dreamweaver or do you have to use some thing like GIF Animator? How do you save text as a GIF to do this?
Thank you for your patience and your help.

[Jen Worden]

Hi Little Angel ...

Creating animated gifs are a 2 step process - the graphic side and the saving side.

For the first, any graphics program is fine (though specialized ones like Flash certainly make the process painless!) - you have to have one screen for each part of the animation.

Adobe's Photoshop 6.0, ImageReady or Macromedia's Fireworks allows you to group multiple images and save as animated gifs.

Gif Animator is fine, as well, but doesn't allow any manipulation of the images.

One nice little trick is to save someone's animated gif and import it into any of the above programs and see how they've been constructed.

Observe, deconstruct, learn then create your own!

Hope that helps!

cfn ... Jen
Jen Worden
Web Developer
www.meadoworks.com

[Little Angel]

Thanks...in terms of text but not graphics how do i save pure text as a graphic file?

[Erik Heyninck]

Do fly with your rainbow-coloured wings to the XaraX forum, and take a look at the topic: "flash is dead...". Of course it isn't, but this small and very handy programme called SWISH is indeed something special, and you do not need a black belt in Kung Fu and Einstein's brains to work with it. Really angelic.
And in the Ulead forum you find Cool RD which is also a breeze, though different.
And of both you can download trials.

...and to save text as graphics you have to use a drawing programme that can converse the text to shapes or paths whatever it may be called in your programme. Which one do you use? You may want to try XaraX (trial downloadable)?

Erik [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_cool.gif[/img]

[This message was edited by Erik Heyninck on January 11, 2001 at 10:38 AM.]

[Little Angel]

I use Photoshop 6. How can I just use text which I can then save as a gif and animate. The reason I want to do this is to animate headings on my webpage.
Thanks.

[Jen Worden]

Okay, first off if you are using PS6 then you probably have ImageReady. Use IR to do your animation - it's dirt simple! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

IR uses layers as animation frames and you can even "tween" between frames (ie. you want Hello to move over to World - simply say in how many frames, and *poof* like magic : Done!)

For a far better explanation than I could ever do, go to IR's Help and look for "Creating animations" in the Index.

Good luck!

cfn ... Jen
Jen Worden
Web Developer
www.meadoworks.com