Xara Webster - Using Background Textures

The Clipart Gallery contains a wide range of bitmaps suitable for backgrounds on web pages. They tile together to give a seamless background. We have made the file sizes as small as possible so they download quickly over the Internet.

To use a bitmap as a background

We suggest you open a new document. (Use New on the File menu).
Open the Clipart Gallery by choosing Clipart Gallery from the Utilities menu.
Scroll down the gallery until you reach the Background sections.
Decide which bitmap you want to use.
Import it into Webster by dragging-and-dropping onto the page (or by clicking on it, then clicking Import on the gallery).
Scale it to the size you require. Scaling them up loses quality and the individual pixels that make up the bitmap may become obvious.
You may want to make it lighter or darker. See Making objects lighter or darker for details.
Make any other changes you require such as adding text. Remember this will appear as a background which you don't want to distract from the other items on the page.
Make sure that the texture is selected.
Export it as a 96 dpi JPEG. On the JPEG Export dialog box:

If you haven't changed the bitmap, select Use Original JPEG. This dims the other options.
Otherwise you have to select a quality setting. Lower settings give greater compression but lower quality. We suggest saving the file then viewing it in a browser . If the quality loss is noticeable, save the file again with a higher Quality setting. Alternatively, if the file size is too big, save with a lower Quality setting. The best setting depends on the particular bitmap. For example the center bitmap at the top of the page has more detail and needed a higher quality setting than the other two. Only you can decide the best compromise between quality and file size.
Deselect Progressive JPEG - there is little advantage in progressive loading of small JPEGs.

Including a background on a web page

The HTML BODY command for the page should read
<BODY BACKGROUND="texture.jpg">
where texture.jpg is the filename of your graphic (assuming the graphic is in the same directory as the web page). The BODY command can also contain other attributes such as setting link or text colors

You can check that the page looks correct by viewing it in a browser.

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