Gimp and transparent GIFs
 

All in all, I've found the GIMP to be pretty amiable and reasonable for all the things I've wanted to do.

But, I'm having one problem with it: when I create text with a transparent background (it looks perfectly fine on the GIMP), but once I put the image into use (I'm using it on my website, and it's text with a transparent background that goes over an image) the text automatically becomes real fuzzy around the edges, and the text, consequently, looks pretty ugly. It seems to do this with all fonts.

Anyone have any idea to get around this -- or, any other particular way to do it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This is caused by using antialiased fonts, which blur the edges to make the corners look rounder and the text more readable.

The problem is that GIF only allows you to use one colour as fully transparent, and so it assumes a default background colour to blur against.

The worst solution is to turn off antialiasing; the text may look blocky but should at least be sharp-edged.

A better solution is to use a better file format, like PNG (Portable Network Format, supported on all graphical web browsers that I've come across), that allows an alpha channel, meaning that the blending of the edges of the text can be done more gradually.

The best solution would be to use a vector format that specifies the text as text; unfortunately there aren't many of these (HTML with CSS works quite well but overlapping elements, in particular, tend not to always work as expected across browsers).

Thanks! That worked nice; png transparency is cool. However, I was under the impression that IE doesn't support png format for images. I can't really test it at the mo... since I'm using firefox. But have IE changed, or something?

As far as I am aware they have always been able to display PNG images, and if not, then they definitely can now.

Actually, by all indications everywhere, it seems that Internet Explorer still does not support PNG transparencies and the like. Really quite annoying, but what to do...

i think if you use the latest version of internet explorer the PNG support is okay (including alpha channel, etc.)... there have been many "issues" with PNG support on internet explorer before, but i'd imagine they fixed them by now... of course i'm not sure about this...

http://www.petitiononline.com/msiepng/petition.html

http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...om&btnG=Search