Any sequence of bitmaps in the Xara Webster bitmap gallery can be turned into an animated GIF, whether or not the bitmaps originated in Xara Webster. In this tutorial, you built up a sequence of frames in Xara Webster and made bitmaps from them all, but you could equally well import bitmaps from elsewhere.

Sorting the bitmaps

First, open the bitmap gallery and sort the bitmaps into the correct order, with the first frame at the top. Although it's easy to drag and drop bitmaps around the gallery, it's a good idea to create your bitmaps in frame order in any case.

Select all the bitmaps for the GIF by clicking on the first, scrolling down and Shift-clicking on the last. You can select and de-select individual bitmaps by Ctrl-clicking, but remember that they will be saved in the animated GIF in the same order that they appear in the gallery, not the order that you select them in.

Saving the animated GIF

Click on the 'Save' button - because you have multiple bitmaps selected, the dialog box that appears automatically assumes that you want to save an animated GIF. This box is similar to the familiar bitmap export dialog box, except that it has extra options across the bottom, which we'll discuss later.