The WebXealot  Page 5

Xara X. The Bitmap Gallery (Continued)

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There are not a lot of options to be found when you press the Options button in the Bitmap Gallery. In fact, there is but one option, Find...

Pressing this button opens the Find Gallery Item... dialog in which you can enter keywords, names, or all information to find images housed within the gallery. Using this option, I was able to quickly locate the lighthouse image. On the other hand, I could have found this image just as quickly by scrolling through the thumbnail images.

 

The Save button in the Bitmaps Gallery opens the Export File dialog, shown here, enabling you to save (export) any image in any of Xara's supported bitmap file formats. This is the same group of options and dialogs found when exporting a bitmap in the File pull down menu, except here the only export options are bitmap options.

Bitmap Properties provides much of the same information found next to the thumbnail images in the Bitmap Gallery including the name of the bitmap, if any, the file format, the file as well as physical size of the image, the color depth and presence, or lack of transparency.

In addition you can assign values that will travel with the image should you include the image in a GIF animation. These include Delay for: the amount of time the image is displayed in the animation frame, and the Restore values, Leave as is, Background and Previous Image, used to determine what the image does and does not cover in the frame.

A final option, Smooth When Scaled Up, when checked, enables anti-aliasing of scaled images. This smoothing is usually desirable unless an image contains large areas of flat color and text which when enlarged might result in a loss of detail.

The final button in the Bitmap Gallery is Preview. This button opens the Preview Single Frame dialog shown on the left and displays the entire image, or if the image is larger than the preview window, the portion of the image that fits into the window at actual size.

The top buttons are normally grayed out are only activated while in the Animation window, in which case, the individual frames of the animation can be previewed one at a time, or in their entirety as an animation.