Re: Font Smoothing and CSS

At 22:49 +0100 8.9.97, Carl Johan Berglund wrote:
[justin]
> >You would probably use a transparent GIF, so the
> >background shows through. Since GIFs only support 216 colors, then your
>image
> >will be distorted. And you can't use a JPEG, because it is not
>transparent.
>
> Well, you can't use a transparent GIF either. To anti-alias an image or a
>piece
> of text, you have to know the background. When you anti-alias, you make
>the
> pixels around the edge have some colour in between that of the letter and
>that
> of the background. If you put an anti-aliased image on a multicolored
> background,
> those pixels will stand out from the background and look very peculiar.

If you anti-alias to a solid color, you're right. But you can also
anti-alias to a pattern (like an image) and layer the objects. Perfect
registration is critical here, though, which is still not possible across
browsers, at least not when one of the images is a background image
(foreground offset is unpredictable in Navigator).

PNG has 8-bit transparency, which would allow "live" anti-aliasing of
images to arbitrary backgrounds. Unfortunately, I don't believe that either
4.0 browser supports this PNG feature. Doh!

__________________
Todd Fahrner
mailto:fahrner@pobox.com
http://www.verso.com/

Received on Monday, 8 September 1997 17:13:15 UTC