Re: Simple Text with shadow as transparent gif impossible?

[Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero]

[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