Xara Webster - Creating Xara Web Files

• Convert text to outlines Selecting this option ensure all your text appears correctly on the viewers machine regardless of what fonts they have installed. Remember it will make your web files larger though.
• Convert blends to outlines This option is included so you can create images for the beta of Version 2 of the Xara plugin which at the current time does not render blends.
• Remove preview bitmapThis options removed the preview bitmap from the web file. This makes it a little smaller.
• JPEG Quality SliderThis setting changes the quality level used for saving all the 8-bit (256 color) and 24-bit (millions of colors) bitmaps in your web file.
• Area to ViewThis sets what position and zoom is used when the web file is shown in a web page.

The basic rule is that the more shapes and more complexity in the illustration, the larger the file. Xara Web files are made up from the vector descriptions (at 72,000 dpi) of all the points in the lines and outlines of the objects. Therefore the more objects you have, or the more complex those shapes are (i.e. the more points on the line), the larger the file becomes.

• Keep the number of objects to a minimum
• Try and use simple shapes where possible
• Use clipart with fractals and graduated fills in as these take up very little space and look stunning.
• Using bitmaps in your web files can be a bad idea because they are saved as GIF or JPEG images in the .xar or .web file. This removes the advantages of the compact format. (Although you can do things with these bitmaps, like make them semi-transparent, that you cannot do with plain JPEG and GIFs.)
• To create amazing effects that take up very little space, you can use overlaid transparency.
• Some of the clipart includes 'blends' which are sets of shapes created by blending from one shape to another. Although they look complex, they take up very little space as only the end objects are stored.
• Use duplicated, cloned or copied shapes - Xara Webster identifies identical shapes used in the drawing and eliminate all the data for the copies.
• When you create text, it is best to use the typical system fonts that are likely to be available on the viewer machine. This means mainly Times and Arial (Helvetica) because these two are almost guaranteed to be available on the computer viewing the image. You can stretch, rotate, skew and color the text or even give it thick outlines and make it transparent. This takes very little file space but still gives you a huge variety of stylistic options.

• If you use fonts other than the ones that are likely to be available on all machines (Times, Arial and Courier) the text will not appear correctly on machines that do not have the font you have used.
• The physical size of the drawing does not matter. A major advantage of vector formats is that an illustration occupying a large full screen window takes no longer to download than the same image displayed as only a few pixels across in the corner of the window. This completely unburdens the designer from the size constraints that restrict GIF and JPEG graphics.
• If you do use bitmaps in a web file, they will always be converted into JPEG files to reduce the size of the file as much as possible.
• You can include a bitmap on a web page so people can zoom in and out of it very easily by just creating a web file with the bitmap in it!

• Advanced Internet Graphics
• Xara Web Files and HTML