Animated gifs on WebHelp Toolbar

[myra]

Hi,
I downloaded an animated gif and added to my Images. I can successfully insert it as my Logo on the WebHelp Toolbar but the pic doesn't move, however it is animated in the Logo preview. What am i missing/doing wrong? My target is MyWebHelp.

Please and thank you,
M

[LTinker68]

Does it animate if you put it in a topic? Also, when you created the animated GIF, did you specify that it should loop?

[myra]

No it doesn't animate in a topic. Re loop... i'm just a lowly Bus Analyst trying to create a web manual so i don't even know what that means. I downloaded an animated pic and just hoped it would work...

[LTinker68]

It's been awhile since I've created an animated GIF, but at the time I did it I believe I had the option to loop the animation so it would continually play. If you don't do that, then the default behavior is to play through once then stop. It's possible that your GIF starts the animation while the page is still loading, so by the time you see the whole page the animation is done. If you right-click on the GIF file and select to open it in a browser (i.e., run it by itself outside of Flare), does the animation play, and does it play once or over and over again.

[myra]

Yes it does move and doesn't stop moving when i open it with a brower.

'Loose Nut" lol!

[LTinker68]

Ok, so it sounds like it is a problem when an animated GIF is used with Flare. I don't remember anyone else bringing this up before, so there might not be a workaround available. You should submit a bug report at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx.

[NorthEast]

I just tried this in Flare v6.1; for me, animated GIFs work on the toolbar and in topics.

[myra]

I ended up trying a couple of different gifs. Most of them worked... some didn't?? So i'm using the ones that worked. Thanks for checking out.

M

[Johanna]

I face the same problem.
I know it is many years later but maybe someone has some new insights into the reason for some animated gifs not to loop?
I have only one that shows only once in my HTML5 output and then it stops.

[Richard W]

I've just run into this issue too. It appears to happen (in my case) because I've got a style applied to the images to resize them. Weirdly, this causes Flare to actually regenerate an image at the "new" size - looking at the output, it's not using my original gif but a new one with a size appended to the file name. (For example, I'm using MyImage.gif but the output has MyImage800x300.gif). The regenerated gif is not animated.

If I remove the style from the image, it uses the original in the output and this works, but the original is much too large for the context...

Using CSS to resize an animated gif in an ordinary HTML page (written by hand) using the same style I'm using in Flare works fine. It's Flare that is deliberately regenerating the image to resize it, for some odd reason.

Presumably the workaround is to resize all the animations by hand, but annoyingly i haven't time to do so.

[doloremipsum]

This is happening because you have the Generate resized copies of scaled images option checked in the Target (Advanced tab). It has exactly the behaviour you've described, and I've found too that the option kills animated gifs (presumably because Flare creates a new copy of the image but doesn't bring along all of the animation info).

So flick that off and gifs will work, but there may be some reduction in quality of other resized images.

[Richard W]

Thanks doloremipsum, I missed your reply at the time but I just discovered and unchecked that option myself, expecting it to have the desired effect.

I was coming back to post because it didn't actually work for me. I'd got round the issue in the first place by not resizing the image in the CSS (I created a new image style with the same borders and so on but no max-width tag), which worked even though the animated images were larger than I'd have liked them to be in the output. With the "Generate resized copies..." option unchecked, I changed the style on the animated images to the style that does use max-width 800 and regenerated everything, but the resized images are still being generated in the output - so that rather than myimage.gif and resizing with the CSS stylesheet, the output is using myimage_800x444.gif still. Inspecting the element shows that it has applied the correct style with a max-width of 800, so the regenerated image is redundant.

I can't see why this would be, other than the setting is just not working. I have cleared browser caches, made sure all the previous output files were deleted properly and checked that the settings had saved, and even checked that the resized image wasn't being referenced directly in the source. I also tried resizing it to max-width 400, which created a myimage_400x222.gif file that I know has never previously existed in this project and so can't have been caused by an old setting or piece of code still being picked up...

Any ideas? It sounds as though the feature you're talking about must work correctly for you and others.

[Richard W]

Just to update this thread - I found my problem with the "Generate resized copies of scaled images" setting. Apparently if your CSS is using max-width, rather than width, then turning this setting off has no effect and Flare continues to regenerate images. This is a bug, but you can get round it by using "width" instead of "max-width".

I changed the image styles to use "width: 800px;" (and others at appropriate sizes), turned off "Generate resized copies...", applied the styles to the animated gifs and it all worked as it should do.