text to bitmap problems

I see websites with text as bitmaps that look very smooth and precise, even at about a 10 point font. How is this done? Whenever I convert my text to bitmaps (jpg or gif) they are always blotchy and never very well defined unless the font started out somewhere around 18 points. I have tried turning on and off the maintain screen anti-aliasing, turning up the dpi for jpg's and nothing seems to give me crisp clear text. How are others doing it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
BoffoDude

I see websites with text as bitmaps that look very smooth and precise, even at about a 10 point font. How is this done? Whenever I convert my text to bitmaps (jpg or gif) they are always blotchy and never very well defined unless the font started out somewhere around 18 points. I have tried turning on and off the maintain screen anti-aliasing, turning up the dpi for jpg's and nothing seems to give me crisp clear text. How are others doing it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
BoffoDude

I really don't understand why you are having the problem you describe. I haven't seen any problems with text above 8 or 9 pts in size. When you say, "I convert my text to bitmaps", are you saying you have the text selected and you are using the file>export dialog? Also, if you are using transparent .gifs, you have to make sure the background you are exporting from matches the background of the page to which they are inserted. To do this, hold the Ctrl key and click on the page background color in the Xara palette and drag it onto the page. Then Xara will anti-alias the edges of the text properly.

One thing you can do at very small text sizes, is to lay multiple copies on top of each other. This has to do with how Xara's anti-aliasing engine works. Below is an example I did some time ago, but it illustrates what I'm talking about.

I remember a thread on this subject many months ago, with Mark "TheKeeper" comparing small fonts in PS and Xara...might look it up.

Welcome to the forum.
As a general rule text is rendered best in a gif raster image rather than in a jpg raster, esp if the background is a solid single colour.
See examples below.
The jpg is 1.5Kb with 80% compression
The gif is 1.5Kb at 256 colours
Egg

.

Hello Boffodude

My suggestion is GIFs and if at all possible, solid, non transparent backgrounds.

If not anti-aliased, text when displayed as bitmaps appears very jagged, especially at small sizes, because of the limited number of pixels avaialble to render the text.

Anti-aliasing is a process that creates small intermediate colored pixels to smooth the edges of objects (including text).

The attached image is three fonts at 10 point, Georgia, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana, all Microsoft web fonts, at 100% and 1000%. At 1000% you can see the anti-aliasing and the small number of pixels you have to render the text.

GIF images do a better job rendering anti-aliased text than do JPEGs, especially as Eric B points out, if the text is over a solid color background.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~garypriester">
Be it ever so humble...</a>

and those render well in bitmap editors. I think Xara doesn't support them. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]