Computer graphics: from ASCII art to animated GIFs

Today's state-of-the-artanimated GIFshave a proud history.ASCII art Image credit: Chris.comAt the dawn of the computer age, computer graphics were crude. Computers were best at manipulating numbers and text, so developers created programs that used alphanumeric characters to create images. Some programming courses assigned students the task of writing a program to generate banners of giant letters made of many smaller letters. This ASCII art could portray recognizable images, but at incredibly low resolution.In the early days of the personal computer, when bulletin board systems became popular venues for home computers to share files, ASCII art evolved into ANSI art, which used an extended ASCII character set and ANSI escape sequences to create 16-color images.ANSI art Image credit: norbert79One of the big competitors to individual...
This topic first appeared in the Spiceworks Community

I am afraid you will have to learn to live with conversion issues between Illustrator and Fireworks: Fireworks, although doing a very good job, is NOT Illustrator, and I found that complex artwork often includes parts that are very difficult for FW to retain in their original quality.
A work-around is to bring in the artwork in parts, and manually fix the broken bits and pieces as you go along.
And, of course, you can always save the Illustrator work as a very high resolution bitmap version, and import that into Fireworks. I mean: the graphics are produced in Illustrator, and they do not need to be editable in Fireworks, do they?
Anyway, it is curtains for Fireworks - it's no longer being updated or developed. Photoshop now has Generator, which is arguably a better approach to web export than Firework's aging slicing. The smart objects (including their new state option) and new alignment tools, and the many plugins and improvements make Photoshop quite useful as a replacement. Smart objects in Photoshop display even extremely complicated AI files without a hitch.

Similar Messages

Applet Parameters For Animated Gif Using AWT

I need to have my applet except parameters to change from one type of animated gif (dog) to another animated gif (cat). There are two for each animal. If the animal parameter is "dog" the dog1.gif and the dog2.gif will be used for the animation. I'm not too sure on how to go about this.
private String sDog;
private String sCat;
sDog = getParameter("");
if (sDog.equalsIgnoreCase("dog"))
How do I add both gifs in the control statement?
Thanks so much,
Jeff

private String sDog;
private String sCat;
sDog = getParameter("dog");
for(int i=1;i<3;i++){
if (sDog.equalsIgnoreCase("dog" i".gif"))
//code to display the gif
remember your parameter should be <b>dog</b>

Keynote crash when recording with animated gif

I'm running Keynote 6.5 on a MBP with Yosemite. While trying to record a voiceover on a Keynote presentation, the program continually crashes whenever I get to a slide with an animated gif. The gif won't play, but I CANNOT exit the program. The interface appears to be responsive, but in fact nothing works. I can call up the slide navigator, but unable to switch slides. Buttons appear to click but nothing happens. I cannot bring up the Activity Monitor. Command Tab does nothing. I have no choice but to restart the computer.
Any suggestions?

Yes animated GIF's cause problems in record slideshow; Keynote is perpetually running an animation and won't advance to the next slide.
I record the voiceover outwith Keynote as separate clips, and place the appropriate clip on each slide, when I do this Keynote plays correctly.

Animated gif from flash

CS4, AS3.Windows XP SP3.
I've created a pretty simple flash animation with some text that fades in and moves around a bit. Nothing fancy. It runs just fine both locally and on my client's site. I need to turn it into an animated gif so that non-flash viewers will see the animation. But I can't seem to get it to come out right. It needs to have a transparent background and it needs to run just once. Like I said, all that runs fine as an SWF.
When I choose the export option in the file menu (export movie as gif), it does export and I can run the gif but the background is definitely not transparent and the thing loops continuously. Yes, I've checked the "transparent" checkbox and also set the repetitions to 1. Neither of those settings do anything.
I also tried "publishing" the gif. That's even worse. The resultant animation doesn't even resemble my SWF. It's a blocky mess when it runs. It does appear to have a transparent background but it loops over and over and again it's a blocky mess (not sure how else to explain that).
The whole thing is just about 10 layers of different lines of text that are tweened in various ways to get the effect I need.
You can see the animation on the right hand side of this page: www.ssrights.com. It's the one that says "FREE! Consultation..."
Hope someone can help.
Thanks,
Keith
PS: The gif is not in place. I currently have it set to just show a static image if someone does not have flash.

Look, I appreciate that you are making an effot to help, but I hope you realize that most pages like that are just there to attract advertisers. They are mostly nonsense. Filled with fluff and little that's actually helpful. Often copied verbatim from the help file of some application. Not the least bit beneficial. There are tons of "how to" sites out there that say next to nothing and still use a lot of words. I run into them countless times each day. It's beyond irritating when you're trying to learn how to do something. This paragraph on that page you referred me to is a perfect example:
Set other options for your animated GIF publication. Optimize the color of the GIF to remove unused colors so that the image size will be reduced. Set "Dither Solids" so that the colors will be mixed in the current existing palette. Other options you have to set up are Interlace, Smooth, and Remove Gradients. Set all of them very well so that your animated GIF will be published at its best quality.
Just look at the grammar in the last sentense. It doesn't even make sense and offeres zero useful information. Probably came out of the entirely useless Adobe help system that's fond of defining a term with the term itself.
Back to the GIF settings. I've chosen nearly every combination of settings on the GIF publish tab. Nothing I do works. The only thing that solved the problem (and it's a crummy solution) was to change the text to a broken apart graphic. I'm sure you are more expert in Flash than I am and so you likely know how to solve this. Have you created a simple example with text and successfully published it as a GIF? You don't even need to tween the text. It can be sitting still on it's own layer and it still fouls things up. If so, what settings are you using to make this work right? That inforamtion would be very helpful!
Again, is there anyone out there that has specifically dealt with this problem and can offer a specific, viable solution?
Keith

Animated gif from .ICO files - Indicates layer is partially locked

thanks for helping the non-graphics newb out...
trying to create my first animated gif. I have 8 .ico files that i converted to .png to open them. once all are open i try to combine into one file with 8 layers but am unable to do it!?!? If I click on the main layer in any file it shows as locked and says "Indicates layer is partially locked"

in any file it shows as locked and says "Indicates layer is partially locked"
That is normal. Just open the file you want to use as the base/background layer. Now open the file that will be the first layer up from that, press ctrl+a (cmd+a on a mac) to select all of it, then ctrl+c (cmd+c) to copy it. Switch back to the background layer, click in it, then press ctrl+v (cmd+v) to paste it and use the move tool to position it. Repeat for each layer. Note that layers in an animated gif do not play in front of hte base layer the way cartoon cels do, so that you see action in front of a backdrop. You must include everything you want to see at once in each layer.

Can't figure out how to make a graphic expand in an animated gif (CS4)

I'm trying to make an animated gif where two of my graphics expand to the outer edges of the picture. However all that I can manage to accomplish is to have the opacity fade in or out. Is it possible to make a graphic expand in CS4?
Thanks for any help!

I'm not very familiar with animation using Photoshop. I have a small amount of experience using Illustrator, but not much. I'm not sure what a normal timeline is.
What I'm trying to do should be very simple. I want to emulate a tv screen flickering on, using 2 white bars that expand outwards from the center of a blackish background.

How Do I Load An Animated GIF Into PictureBox Control From Byte Array?

I'm having a problem with loading an animated GIF int a picturebox control in a C# program after it has been converted to a base64 string, then converted to a byte array, then written to binary, then converted to a base64 string again, then converted to
a byte array, then loaded into a memory stream and finally into a picturebox control.
Here's the step-by-step code I've written:
1. First I open an animated GIF from a file and load it directly into a picturebox control. It animates just fine.
2. Next I convert the image in the picturebox control (pbTitlePageImage) to a base64 string as shown in the code below:
                if (pbTitlePageImage.Image != null)
                    string Image2BConverted;
                    using (Bitmap bm = new Bitmap(pbTitlePageImage.Image))
                        using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
                            bm.Save(ms, ImageFormat.Jpeg);
                            Image2BConverted = Convert.ToBase64String(ms.ToArray());
                            GameInfo.TitlePageImage = Image2BConverted;
                            ms.Close();
                            GameInfo.TitlePageImagePresent = true;
                            ProjectNeedsSaving = true;
3. Then I write the base64 string to a binary file using FileStream and BinaryWriter.
4. Next I get the image from the binary file using FileStream and BinaryReader and assign it to a string variable. It is now a base64 string again.
5. Next I load the base64 string into a byte array, then I load it into StreamReader and finally into the picturebox control (pbGameImages) as shown in the code below:
byte[] TitlePageImageBuffer = Convert.FromBase64String(GameInfo.TitlePageImage);
                        MemoryStream memTitlePageImageStream = new MemoryStream(TitlePageImageBuffer, 0, TitlePageImageBuffer.Length);
                        memTitlePageImageStream.Write(TitlePageImageBuffer, 0, TitlePageImageBuffer.Length);
                        memTitlePageImageStream.Position = 0;
                        pbGameImages.Image = Image.FromStream(memTitlePageImageStream, true);
                        memTitlePageImageStream.Close();
                        memTitlePageImageStream = null;
                        TitlePageImageBuffer = null;
This step-by-step will work with all image file types except animated GIFs (standard GIFs work fine). It looks like it's just taking one frame from the animation and loading it into the picturebox. I need to be able to load the entire animation. Does any of
the code above cause the animation to be lost? Any ideas?

There is an ImageAnimator so you may not need to use byte array instead.
ImageAnimator.Animate Method
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.imageanimator.animate(v=vs.110).aspx
chanmm
chanmm

Animated GIFs don't loop in exported movies from Keynote 3

I am just getting started with Keynote 3.0 and really like what I have seen. I created a series of slides and pasted animated GIFs in various places. They are set to loop on each slide as Keynote presents the slides. The slide show has preset transition and build timings and there is music playing continuously, throughout the show. It works quite well. (However, there is very intermittent choppy audio and video playback when there are builds or transitions occurring. Any thoughts on optimizing this?)
The problems begin when I ask Keynote to export the slideshow to a movie. The main problem that I am struggling with is that the animated GIFs don't loop in the rendered movie, regardless of which compressor I choose. I don't see anything in the documentation. I have also searched several of the discussions on making movies from Keynote 3 but have not specifically seen animated GIFs discussed. What am I missing here?
Also, I want to be able to play this movie on a DVD player at an upcoming function. Any recommendations for an approach that will be best? I have QT 7 Pro and the iLife '06 suite.
Thanks, in advance, for any forthcoming suggestions.
eMac G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6) 1.25 GHz, 1 GB RAM

My guess is, it's too much of a pain to have to calculate how many times it will actually loop and create the loops and then composite everything. Running it in Keynote just tells the thing to keep playing over and over till you do something that stops it. There's a BIG difference there as one is just being told to play, the other is having to be placed in a movie with an exact number of frames, so there are a bunch of calculations involved.

Animated gif's from unsaved file?

I used to be able to create animated gif's easily from unsaved files. I would simply select all the layers I wanted to use and process them.
After upgrading to CS6, I'm totally lost. I've followed half a dozen tutorials, but nothing works. The only way I can even load a frame into the Windows Timeline feature is to first save several images from my unsaved file, then reload them by choosing File > Scripts > Load Files into Stacks. But even then I can't find a Make Frames from Layers option when I click the down arrow on the right side of the palette.
Is there a simple way to create animated gif's from layers in an unsaved file on CS6, or do I need to reinstall my older Photoshop version in order to created animations?
Thanks.

Yes, I clicked Frame Animation Mode, but that's as far as I can get. It doesn't work the same as my older version of Photoshop. The only buttons that appear to function on the left side of the palette are "Split at playhead" and "Select a transition," and they actually don't do anything.
The tutorials tell me to click the down arrow on the right side of the palette and choose "Make Frames from Layers," but that choice isn't listed. The choices that are listed include "Loop Playback" and "Allow Frame Skipping."
I've tried several tutorials and have experimented with just about every button and arrow I can find, but I can't get any farther than the image you posted.

Import animated GIF from Photoshop?

I have a question... I am unable to create custom animated gif's in Photoshop 5/6 and import them into Captivate 7. It just says "The GIF file contains errors". I've tried exporting on multiple settings and still no luck, same with exporting from Fireworks.
I am however able to import an exported gif from Flash, yet the quality is horrible and the transparency is buggy. Is anyone else having this issue, or is there some setting that I am missing? Basically I need to animate some images within a Captivate project, without the need of using a .SWF (for HTML5 output). Any help would be much appreciated, thank you.

I experienced this issue with Captivate 8 and Photoshop CC...
I eventually realized if the animation has any frames with "no delay" I would get the error. Changing those frames to a 0.1 second delay resolved my issue. Not sure if this is the same bug you are experiencing but it's worth a try!

Animated gif from InDesign CS5

I am trying to animate 4 pages (of text and graphics) so they appear 1 at a time in an never ending loop in InDesign so I can export and create and animated GIF for a web banner.
The only way I have managed to do it so far is to group the text and graphics on each page, copy pages 2, 3, 4 onto page 1. Layer them on top of each other, animate them to appear 1 at a time by delaying the timing a second for each.
But I can't get it to work as a loop. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

ziggy - have you found any more about it - its ridiculous that you can have pretty good animation presets and create great looking flash animations that than you can't do anything usefull with.
Bob - there are lots of other proper tools for this however i em not able to find preset animation palette in photoshop and i'd love to see how long will take you to animate words disapearing in a puff of smoke in photoshop. It took me 30 seconds in indesign. Also as i have poster, flyer, pull up banner design in indesign already with all fonts colours and style for the campaign why should i need to recreate the whole design in photoshop to make elements on the page fade, move and disapear in a puff of smoke?

Problem to display Animated Gif from HTML into JEditorPane

I have a problem displaying animated gif that comes from URL (HTML) into JEditorPane.
Let me show you the source I have:
* @author Dobromir Gospodinov
* @version 1.0
* Date: Dec 6, 2002
* Time: 6:47:53 PM
package test.advertserver;
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.io.IOException;
public class Test {
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          JFrame frame = new JFrame();
          JEditorPane ed = new JEditorPane();
          try {
               ed.setPage("http://localhost:8200/servlet?key=value");
          } catch (IOException e) {
               e.printStackTrace();
          JPanel panel = new JPanel();
          panel.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(500, 500));
          panel.add(ed);
          frame.getContentPane().add(panel);
          frame.pack();
          frame.setVisible(true);
}Part of the returned from servlet HTML includes an img tag:
<img src="/images/MyAnimatedGif.gif" alt="animated gif comment" width="480" height="50" border="0">Let us assume that MyAnimatedGif.gif has 10 frames and gif is looped - when the 10th is dipslayed it has to display the 1st and so on.
JEditorPane displays frames from 1 to 10 correctly but does not start from the first again. Instead JEditorPane displays a broken image.
I locate where the problem arise:
JEditorPane has an HTMLEditorKit that creates javax.swing.text.html.ImageView instance for every IMG tag.
And here is the problem:
ImageView has an ImageObserver necessary for the asynchronous image download. ImageObserver has the imageUpdate method. But this imageUpdate method is never called with ALLBITS flag raised up. Instead, after the last frame of MyAnimatedGif.gif is downloaded the imageUpdate method is called with flag ERROR raised up. Obviously this is a bug of Sun's implementation. Finaly the flag ALLBITS has to be received for normal end of image observing. But ALLBITS flag does not come.
So, can anybody help me how to load an animated gif within JEditorPane completely.
Thank You in advance,
Dobromir Gospodinov
P.S. If somebody of you wants to debbug what happens within ImageView will have to implement it (and related classes too, because of the limited package visability) borrowing the source from Sun's ImageView.

I'm also having this problem with java 1.4.1 I discovered that some animated gifs work fine, while others stop animating. Running with java 1.3.1 fixed the problem. I'm going to report this as a bug
Here's my code:
import java.awt.*;
import java.io.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class AnimatedGifTester
extends JFrame
public static void main(String argv[])
throws Exception
new AnimatedGifTester();
public AnimatedGifTester()
throws Exception
String[] images = new String[] {
"http://www.gif.com/ImageGallery/Animated/Animals/Photographic/dog_running.gif",
"http://www.gif.com/ImageGallery/Animated/Characters/Cartoon/java.gif",
"http://www.webdeveloper.com/animations/bnifiles/anielg.gif",
"http://www.webdeveloper.com/animations/bnifiles/cat2.gif",
"http://images.animfactory.com/animations/animals/fish/big_fish_swimming_md_wht.gif",
"http://www.webgenies.co.uk/images/martian.gif",
"http://www.webdeveloper.com/animations/bnifiles/at_sign_rotating.gif",
"http://www.webdeveloper.com/animations/bnifiles/arrow_1.gif",
"http://www.gif.com/ImageGallery/Animated/Characters/Cartoon/javaacro.gif",
"http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/2D/samples/suite/Image/duke.running.gif",
"http://www.gif.com/ImageGallery/Animated/SouthPark/Cartoon/stan.gif"
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer("<html><body>");
for (int idx = 0; idx < images.length; idx++)
buffer.append("<img src='" + images[idx] + "'>");
buffer.append("</body></html>");
String html = buffer.toString();
// save a copy of the html to open in a browser so we can see what it's
// supposed to look like
BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("animatedGifTest.html"));
writer.write(html);
writer.close();
JEditorPane editorPane = new JEditorPane("text/html", html);
editorPane.setEditable(false);
getContentPane().add(editorPane);
setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
setSize(new Dimension(400, 600));
show();

How to download an animated .gif from a web page

how do i download to my mac an animated gif that is on a web page....when i want a picture or text or something like that i just ...apple shift 4 and "take a picture of it" ...but i want the animation..i have never had to do that on this mac.....a windoze person from the site(chat site) said just right click but my wireless mac mouse doesnt do that....i would appreciate any help.....i do know how to down load from a site that has downloadable .gifs...you just click the download sign they have and no problem....but this is just a random animated .gif from a web page ....i hope my ques is clear....thank you

Drag and drop it from the webpage onto your desktop. Note that it won't remain "animated" while you're looking at the file's icon, but it should work if you build it into a new website.
And you can right-click with a Mac mouse - you just have to set it up to do so in System Preferences. (Set the right side of the mouse to be a "secondary click".)
Matt

CS4 animated gif imported from Flash - how to link

I have a few animated gifs published from Flash CS4 the files have clickTag info in the actionscript but Flash will not export that so I need to make the animated .gifs click to their respective links.
How do I do in Photoshop CS4?
any help??
rdef

Photoshop can produce animated GIF files but I'm confused by your request.
You cannot embed any linking data in a GIF file. This is done in HTML.

An Animated GIF displays, i.e. moves, for about 5 minutes, then freezes. Other GIFs from the site work indefinitely, and this GIF works indefinitely on IE. Why does it freeze in Firefox?

An Animated Avatar GIF file moves as expected for about 5 minutes, and then freezes. Other animated avatars from the same site work fine, and move indefinitely. To confirm that the site had not exchanged the file for a non-animated version, I right-clicked and selected 'View Image Info' and when I did so, it moved for about half a second. (The image file was the one uploaded.) Loaded the page in IE, this avatar moves indefinitely.
Any ideas why an animated GIF stops in Firefox?

The answer is that Animated GIF files include a Loop Enable Flag as well as a Loop Limit Count. This GIF had a count which should have allowed it to loop for almost 2 hours. But in Firefox it only loops for about 5 minutes.
It appears Firefox is misinterpreting this value to be a Frame Count rather than a Cycle Count.
Is there any Firefox Employees reading this, and can acknowledge this has been added to their Opportunity (a.k.a. Bug) List?

Computer graphics: from ASCII art to animated GIFs

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for