Copypixels from one "alpha-ed" image to another

[Kurt Griffin]

This is a bit brain-dead on my part, and I will figure it out eventually, but I thought I'd throw it out to the list in hopes of a quick solution ;)

I'm copying a dupe of the image of a text member into a dupe of the image of a png member. Given the fact that both carry alpha images, the result is not surprising - the copypixels op pastes the text in, but also cuts a rect the size of the text image out of the background image (as in, the alpha is getting copied to, as well as the image). I can think of three ways around this - one, extract the alpha from the destination image up front, copy, and put the alpha back; two, make an interim image that has no alpha, copy the text to that, and then paste the sucker into the final image; three, use the text member's alpha as the image to copy from.

Specifically, I'm looping through the data from an xml doc, and building cascading menus from it (drop each menu item into a text member, grab the image, copy away, store the dest rect and relevant info for mousing stuff). Since the menu panels overlay the other stuff on screen, I thought it would look nice to have a drop shadow beneath the panels. And it does... except now there are nice big holes around the menu text.

Anyway, I guess I'm just asking if somebody knows which of the above 3 approaches is more expedient, or if there is another way. I'll go ahead and try them out, but I'm sure somebody has trod this path already - James? ;)

tia,
Kurt

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