What happened here? I thought the list didn't accept attachments! - Mark Clements (HappyDog)
"Alexander Shulgin" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Hello everyone, > > I'm totally new to this list, so please pardon me if it's the wrong > place to discuss my idea and please point me to a more suitable list. > > Today, while reading my morning load of news I've come across a > Wikipedia article[1] with some embedded LaTeX formulae, used within a > table. The table header on that page has background of a distinct > color which makes formula images look ugly. Sorry, the article is in > Russian and I didn't find an English counterpart to demonstrate the > issue, but by looking at the table you should get the idea. > > My first thought was "What if we could eliminate that white background > in favor of alpha channel?" Then it will look equally well no matter > what background it is put. > > As I have some experience with PNG images and alpha channel stuff, > I've wrote this simple half-page program (attached) in C++ to > transform any grayscale PNG image containing black-on-white text to > image with alpha channel added, so it display nicely on any background > (except black :). The program uses PNG++, a C++ wrapper library[2] > around libpng. > > A mockup of what it'll look like if we replace currently used formula > image in the table header, with an image transformed by my program is > attached as well. I think that visual improvement is immediately > obvious. > > Now, thanks for your patience if you read till here. :) I'd like to > know if there any drawbacks[3] to the proposed approach? Was it by > design that white background is preserved, if so why and can this be > refined somehow? > > -- > Regards, > Alex > > [1] > http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F > Note: scroll down one page to see the table > > [2] http://www.nongnu.org/pngpp/ > > [3] It needs to be tested with IE6, as it is well known for problems > with transparent PNGs. > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
