Animation properties

To alter the animation's properties, right click on a frame in the Frame Gallery and select Properties. You can then change a number of options detailed below.

The Frame tab

In the Frame tab you can set:

Name: The name of this frame. This is just as a reminder to you, and is not exported with the animated GIF.
Background: If this is set, the frame covers all previous frames. This is useful if you want to create a background and then build up an animation on top of this background. Often the first frame in the animation is a background frame. If the first frame is not a background frame, the animated GIF uses the page background as its background.
Overlay: If this is set, then the frame overlays the previous frame.
Local Delay: Set how long the frame is displayed for in the animation.
Show Frame: When checked, the frame will be shown in the animation.
Moving frame in time line: This value determines the amount by which a frame time is changed when the 'move frame forwards/backwards' buttons are used in the Frame Gallery.

GIF Options

In the GIF Options tab you can set the color usage in GIF animations. Click Options in the Export Animation dialog to show the GIF Options tab in the Animation Export Options dialog.

Palette colors: Set the preferred color palette for your animated GIF. The help guide contains more information on the difference between these options.
Number of Colors in Palette: This option is available only when using optimized palettes. For simple graphics you can reduce the number of colors in the palette. This can produce much smaller files without losing quality. You may need to experiment to find the right balance between file size and quality.
Dithering: You can select between three types of dithering.

Transparency: Select this to make the bitmap transparent where there are no objects.

Animation Loop and Speed

In the Animation Loop and Speed tab you can alter the animation rate and frequency:

Loop: Lets you specify how many times the animation should repeat itself.

Display each frame for: If you want the same delay between each frame in the animation enter a value here. To specify a different delay for individual frames, use the frame tab (described above). This field reads "many" if the animation has more than one inter-frame delay time.

Preview in Browser

You can select options suitable for the graphic and then load it into your browser so you can preview it:

Background options: Alter the background of the animated GIF to see which gives the best result.
Additional information: The preview page will contain useful information such as potential downloading times when placed in a web page.

Browser preview: Press this button to launch a preview in your web browser.

AVI Options

Options: Select from a range of codecs you have installed

Quality: Set the quality value of the AVI (up to 100%)

Key frame every ...: Enable/disable the outputting of key frames and set the frequency.

Transparency: Select to make the AVI background transparent.

Area to save: Setting the area to save to be Drawing will create an AVI animation that is only as large as it needs to be – i.e. the same as the outer bounds of the animation. This can be useful if you don't need a specific page size.