Several of you more astute readers politely pointed out to me that instead of creating the animation frames in Xara 2's Drawing window, converting each to bitmap, then exporting the whole mess as an animated gif, as I had in last month's tutorial, that I should create the animation in Xara's Animation window, which then automatically sizes the animation to the largest shape, converts the vector objects to bitmap frames, and creates a tidy animation. I humbly submit, (smack upside the head!) they are right. So here's what we're going to do.
Paste the objects into Xara's Animation window. (Done)
Click the Frame Properties button on the Property bar. Check the box that says Background. This uses the illustration as a background only once, instead of in every frame, which will keep the file size smaller.
Find the diamond shape color on the screen palette that represents RGB 153, 153, 153, hold down the Ctrl key, and drag the color onto the page. This sets the background color to 50% black. Ultimately we're going to use the same politan.jpg as a background for a web page and the gray will anti-alias our animation to gray.
Select the four animation items only, copy (Ctrl-C) them, click on the New Frame button, the first button, and Paste (Shift - Ctrl - V) the animation items directly on top. You notice when you created the new frame that the illustration and type are already there, as well as the animation items.
Repeat create new frame and Paste (Shift - Ctrl - V) fifteen more times until you have a total of 16 frames.
