Simple Text with shadow as transparent gif impossible?
Hallo, I want to create a transparent gif, containing a text with a drop shadow (for use in a Web-page). Basically creating such an image is not very hard but converting the result to an indexed palette results in a relly bad picture. Here is what I tested: 1. Create a new RGB picture with tansparent fill type 2. Write a text (black) in this picture 3. Add a drop (black or grey) shadow with Script-Fu-Shadow-Drop-Shadow Now the picture looks like I want to have it and its time to convert it into a gif: 4. Do a "Merge visible layers" 5. Run Image-Mode-Indexed and select "Optimal Palette" and "Enable Dithering of transparency" The result is a 1bit palette image, that really does not look fine. The shadow is now only a collection of black dots and looks horrible. I can also choose Web-Palette in the Mode-dialog from above, but the result is always the same. What did I wrong? How can I create a showed text stored in a tranparent gif where only the Text and the shadow should be visisble. Thanks a lot Rainer -- - Rainer Krienke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Universitaet Koblenz, http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke Rechenzentrum, Voice: +49 261 287 - 1312 Rheinau 1, 56075 Koblenz, Germany Fax: +49 261 287 - 1001312 -
Re: Simple Text with shadow as transparent gif impossible?
What did I wrong? How can I create a showed text stored in a tranparent gif where only the Text and the shadow should be visisble. gif only supports one bit alpha, as you figured out. If you want a picture with 256 bit alpha, use png. Note that support for this on web browsers is not very good (IE and mozilla support it fine), but it is the only way that I know of to do it. Conversly, you could flatten the image and delete just the background (leaving a light hue around the text), but then why even use a transparent gif? -James Smaby
Re: Simple Text with shadow as transparent gif impossible?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (2000-10-11 at 0915.09 -0400): What did I wrong? How can I create a showed text stored in a tranparent gif where only the Text and the shadow should be visisble. gif only supports one bit alpha, as you figured out. If you want a picture with 256 bit alpha, use png. Note that support for this on web browsers is not very good (IE and mozilla support it fine), but it is the only way that IIRC current implementations did not support full alpha PNG. Maybe they have changed lately. I know they can view simple PNGs, but I can not talk about "exotic" PNGs (I still smile when I remember an app I had that loaded RGBA PNGs as CMYK). I know of to do it. Conversly, you could flatten the image and delete just the background (leaving a light hue around the text), but then why even use a transparent gif? There are some tools to add some "border" to the text, so you still get transparency and the page background is visible, but the text borders are smooth and you can have shadows. Look for Perl based Prepare for gif (prep4gif) under Filters Web, and for binary Semiflatten under Filter Colors. They do the work for you pretty fine and you get a nice 50% / 50% solution. GSR
