| | | Animated images |
Animated images have become quite popular on the World-Wide Web. There are various sites from which you can download animated gifs that other people have created: go to your favorite search engine and search on "animated gifs." Also, there are various free services, such as GIFWorks, that will manipulate gif images for you.
You can use many different software tools to create your own animated images. On a Unix system, you might use the program gifmerge. For example, if you have three gif image files named file1.gif, file2.gif, and file3.gif, then you can execute the command
gifmerge file1.gif file2.gif file3.gif > animation.gif
to create an animation that displays the three files in sequence. The program has various options. For instance, the command
gifmerge -255,255,255 -230 -l8 *.gif > new.gif
will roll all your gif files into an animation that loops 8 times with a delay of 2.3 seconds between frames and with the color white (RGB values all 255) set to be transparent. For further options and examples, see the gifmerge documentation.
Please do not go overboard with animation. While moving images do attract attention, they can also distract the reader from the content of your page. (Have you ever tried to hold a serious conversation in a room where a television is on?) If you do use animated images, set them to loop a finite number of times and then stop.
The Math 696 course
pages were last modified April 5, 2005. | | | Animated images |