Creating animated gifs for wiki

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This page will explain how to create animated GIF's for wiki pages like New_IDE_features_since.

Linux

I use two free and open-source tools to create the animated GIF's.

  • XVidCap - captures the animation as single frames
  • Gimp - Image editor to crop, optimize and same the frames as a animated GIF.

Step 1

Decide on what you want to capture. Remember that the width of wiki pages are limited, so fullscreen captures are not an option. It is recommended to only capture the area of interest. Once you know what you want to capture, rehearse the actions you want to capture.

Step 2

Open a terminal window and load XVidCap and set the capture mode to single frames - one image per frame. You do this by right clicking on the filename combo (left side of XVidCap) and select "Single Frame Capture" menu option. We load XVidCap form inside a terminal window simply so we can find the captured images easier. You can even create a specific directory for the animation.

xvidcap.png

By default XVidCap captures the animation at 10fps (frames per second) which is fine for what we want to accomplish.

Step 3

Use the "eye dropper" in the XVidCap main form and draw a rectangle covering the area you want to capture.

Step 4

Now click the red record button to start recording the animation. Now quickly switch to the window in which you rehearsed your actions. Once you finished your action sequence, switch back to XVidCap and click the stop button. You can now close XVidCap. You should now have a lot of *.xwd (X Window Dump) image files in the current directory.