Inserting Webstyle elements into XWD

[boobear]

Here's a couple of sample files that were created out of Webstyle. One is a heading, the others are banners. The banners are animated gifs while the heading is a single-frame gif

I can create a rectangle and use the heading as a bitmap fill and everything is fine. Not so the banners. The fills goes all berserk.

I've tried it as a flash in a placeholder, and other methods that I could think of as well. None give satisfactory results. In one case the preview of the animated gif in a browser was about 10% actual size, using another method the first frame left "aritfacts" displaying in the second frame.

Before anyone asks, I don't know what the "other methods" mentioned above are. I was trying different things so fast and furious, I don't remember what yielded which result. I do know that the artifact problem (my terminology) occured with the ani-gif where the words are accented with "sparkles"

Finally, if anyone decides to visit the site PLEASE know that it's very much still a work in progress.

Thanks...... Boo

[Spinny]

Have you tried adding the animated .gif using the method in this thread?

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=37961

[Soquili]

Hi Boo,

For the static image gif you can simply import and place anywhere on your page and it will display in the exported web site.

For animated gifs you must use a placeholder object that is the same dimensions as the gif. In the Web Properties dialog in the Placeholder tab select replace with graphic file. See the attached image.

The attached zip file contains the .web and an exported website of one page to show how it works.

[boobear]

Thanks Bill, your example works flawlessly. I'm leaning toward using the one with the twinkling stars, but on MY version I had those "artifacts"; by that I mean that parts of the star remained on the image when it wasn't supposed to. That doesn't seem to happen with yours.

BTW, I get more and more facinated with the internal formats of the Xara files. For example, the header (single frame) I sent along earilier had five colors defined in it Miro1 thru Miro5 (within Webstyle).

You can change one of these and wherever that color appears in the final image, it will change. I'm not sure how they do that, knowing the way video memory is normally mapped on the PC.

Many years ago, some PC's had "color registers" and every pixel was mapped to one of those registers. So if you changed the register value, every pixel mapped to that specific registed would change. Sort of like indirect color mapping, I guess. Nowawdays. however I thought that all pixels were mapped DIRECTLY without going thru any sort of register operation.

The lack of color registers would make it MORE difficult to do what Xara is doing here. I've looked at a .wix file in notepad; I'm not even sure it's possible to reverse engineer it. It looks pretty strange to me.

Thanks to all that answered.

Boo

[Soquili]

Hi Boo,

It would be very difficult to reverse engineer a wix file. You would need to have a reference for everything that Xara Xtreme can do internally.

There is a reference to the structure of a .xar file and a .wix is effectively a text version of an uncompressed .xar file.

Really there isn't any need to reverse engineer the .wix, simply open it in Web Designer and you have all the shapes and named colours accessable and editable. Just remember each .wix file is only a small part of a complete toolbar. A heading can be within one .wix file and so can an animated banner.

Color Registers are very old technology. Individual pixels contrain all the data for colour within itself.

[boobear]

Hi Boo,

There is a reference to the structure of a .xar file and a .wix is effectively a text version of an uncompressed .xar file.

Where??

Really there isn't any need to reverse engineer the .wix, simply open it in Web Designer and you have all the shapes and named colours accessable and editable. Just remember each .wix file is only a small part of a complete toolbar. A heading can be within one .wix file and so can an animated banner.

All good info; my thoughts toward reverse engineering would be for the purpose of creating a program to convert all those old webstyle themes, navbars, etc into NATIVE components for XWD. But if it's not THAT much benefit, I'll probably just forget it.

Color Registers are very old technology. Individual pixels contrain all the data for colour within itself.

If they didn't use registers then I am REALLY impressed with Xara's color management algorithms.

Thanks for all your posts/replies/help

Boo

[Soquili]

Where??

http://site.xara.com/support/docs/webformat/spec/

All good info; my thoughts toward reverse engineering would be for the purpose of creating a program to convert all those old webstyle themes, navbars, etc into NATIVE components for XWD. But if it's not THAT much benefit, I'll probably just forget it.

Isn't Web Designer good enough? You open the .wix files and then save to .web

[boobear]

http://site.xara.com/support/docs/webformat/spec/

Isn't Web Designer good enough? You open the .wix files and then save to .web

I found the spec a couple of hours ago. Light bulbs went off all over the place. I'm so embarrassed, I won't even tell what I thinking prior to looking a the XAR format doc.

And FWIW, XWD is plenty good enough.

Boo

[Soquili]

Hi Boo,

The .xar format is impressive.