exporting with transparency

**dudelsack** · 05 February 2006, 08:08 PM

Need help. I'm sure this subject has been somewhere covered, but it is making my life unpleasant...and it seems to be the most annoying problem with Xara, I have.

What do I do to avoid those awful white fringes around some text, or anything that you export into Dreamweaver when you want just the text, and not a rectangle of color behind it. I have repeatedly had this problem ruin what should have been a fun evening of building a website, and have tried everything I know.
I have tried putting a layer behind of the same color as the area behind where I want the text, and then doing a bit of tranparency on that layer, sometimes works well, but not always. I have tried to get the same color as the background, on a bevel, just makes the white ragged edge around the bevel...it is surely some mistake I am making with the settings when I export, but I can't find out what. Much the same crappy results, come from most of the work with xara 3D if you just want to put a 3D effect on some text, without the hokey animations.
Maybe some one can fill me in, on the reason this is happening. I'm sure it will be some sort of anti-aliassing thing or such...but someone must be able to get me over this hump...Thanks!

**jclements** · 05 February 2006, 09:21 PM

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**dudelsack** · 05 February 2006, 10:08 PM

Reference my question:
I have read a bit back into the threads and ran into one

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=20064

that sort of covered this...but not quite. Couple of very good suggestions about doing up a background and covering up the white area with that, same sort of idea I have tried. My problem is though a bit more complicated by the fact that the background is not a solid color, rather a repeated pattern of tiled small images done with CSS. This means I need a real sharp distinction between the background and the overlying text/logo. A plain old solid background won't work because of the sections of the background design that would be covered up. So the problem is rather unable to be solved that way. Maybe one of you has the answer. Wishing you all a good, and successful week!

**Mickie** · 05 February 2006, 10:42 PM

Have you tried using your tiled background rather than a color behind your text and then just select the text when you export? It may not line up exactly but may work.

Mickie

**amoore** · 06 February 2006, 03:32 PM

Hi dudelsack

Mickie's right that you need to antialias against the intended background. Unfortunately, if your destination is a tiled background in a website, getting a proper antialias may not be possible.

The reason is that the image needs to be positioned not only over the general background, but, if the background is not a flat color, positioned on the background exactly as it will be in the destination.

A tiled background in a website is like shifting sand. How could Xara or any other source app get the antialias colors right when the background color under a given edgepixel in the Xara image might be, say, light green when the page is viewed in window size x, dark green when viewed in window size y, and yellow when the user's browser displays the text in Arial instead of Times so all the relationships change?

I'm also curious as to why you added some transparency to the background in one of your export attempts. When you make a background transparent, you pick up some of whatever is behind the "background" -- which was probably a white Xara canvas. Plus, although transparent gifs and perhaps pngs can work very nicely in web situations, they can also produce unintended results if you're not careful.

HTH...

**John Rayner** · 06 February 2006, 11:14 PM

It is not that hard to get a proper background with a gradiate fill if you table it, or set your divisions up accurately... See the top and bottom navigation bars on this site.

**amoore** · 07 February 2006, 03:55 PM

Certainly, if the tiles and the elements can be positioned so they won't shift, it will work. And with a gradient, it's easier. But we don't know what his tile looks like, or how he's positioning his text or other images over the tile.

**bcire68** · 07 February 2006, 09:22 PM

One of the things that I do (and forgive me if I didn't understand the problem) is to put a square, the same color as the thing that I am trying to export behind the item that I am trying to export. I then only select the items that I want to export and complete the export. No antialiasing.

While you aren't blending to a background, you are blending to the same color as the exported item, and you get clean lines.

Hope that helps, und viel spaβ...

Eric

**dudelsack** · 07 February 2006, 10:17 PM

Thanks for the help..guys. I haven't forgotten this situation, and it still makes me upset, but it has come down to having to use a solid light colored background...just to get on with the thing...at least till I get my head out of the place it seems to be stuck. I notice another Thread on this page, a bit newer than this one, that deals with the same problem, sort of. I will try to get a bit of experimentation in tommorrow, in the mean time, I'm up to my neck in a problem with Dreamweaver and the fact that IE and Firefox act totally different when dealing with the same CSS sheet. IE shows colors, Firefox not...but that's another theme and problem.
My original tiled background was quite a complicated tiling, a series of "Family crests" in rows, but with lots of transparency to give the motives a washed out look, and not let them distract from the text and logo. Just sort of background noise. The problem, I suppose, came in because the basis color was a dull red and naturally, the white ragged border of the imported text from Xara just really showed up too well. I have to go over the thing again and figure out just what was suggested and give it another try with a level head. This Firefox stuff has me bugged out, and all I wanted to do was get this tiny website up to the server...8 simple pages....so much for that.

So this note is mostly to just let all you good folks know, I'm still very much interested...just rather distracted at the moment...but.."I will be back"...Thanks!

PS....just read the response from Eric, before uploading this note...maybe I've been rather dense....his simple method seems to work better on a dark background than the other things I was doing....lord knows...might be able to use it that way...will try...and somehow, the CSS is acting better now in Firefox too. Must be the "Haunting hour". It's after midnight now....beddie bye....Thanks!

**RedWombat** · 08 February 2006, 02:27 PM

Hi dudelsack. I can relate to your frustration. The Web is certainly not like Print.

If you have Dreamweaver, do you have Flash? If so you can bring your Xara artwork into Flash and then when placing your Flash (SWF) file into your web page you can set the background of your flash movie to be transparent. I believe that will give you the results your looking for and save you the hassel of trying to line up a tiled background with your image. I've done this many times and it works great. If you want to see a sample here's a link to client site I developed quickly using the concept: http://lri.bigplan.net/sdbp/working/lri/index.htm
Granted, I'm not tiling a background across the whole page, but the column on the left is a background graphic and the header and navigation are Flash with the background set to be transparent overlayed on the column. No aliasing problems here.

Hope this helps.