Strange white spots on "pop-up" photos

[songman]

Sledger, you've opened up my mind to new possibilities.

I used to have to print the output of my poem software to a pdf and then use the copy tool to copy the text to an MS pub document to lay down the text without a white background. (there are not many programs that can lay copied text down on a jpg document as a background. (maybe the Xara graphic software can...I don't know?)

However, as you explained, I really could do the entire thing within XWD.

If I import a JPG of my background, I can then copy the text and paste it over that BG on the web page itself. The strange thing is, that if I choose the "Pop-Up" mode, when I pop that image larger, the white spots still show...but when I group the text and BG togther using "arrange" and "group", then the white spots disappear.

It's just a little hard working with the text and centering certain lines without an actual text box. Steve

[steve.ledger]

(there are not many programs that can lay copied text down on a jpg document as a background. (maybe the Xara graphic software can...I don't know?)

Yes it certainly can..

With the exception of the kittens and frame, everything else is done in Xara Xtreme.
The frame and kitten were 'cut' from the bitmap using the shape editor.
The background, clouds, the glow around the kittens and the slight shadow under them were all done with Xtreme's own vector tools.
(actually, all but the clipview can be done in Web Designer too)

The text was then typed on top using text areas, which makes it much easier to position.

The font I used is Lucida Calligraphy.

Open the Melanie#2.web file in Web Designer and export the site.
Change nothing, you should not see anywhere near the same compression/spottiness around the fonts etc.
(Though any of the very warm red/reddish colours cam be a drama with JPG compression)

The image attached to this post was exported from WD.

[songman]

Sledger, thanks for your help. Your method sounds good but on the few illustrations where the dots appeared, I just chose PNG for the image format and they disappeared. I hope I did not increase the size of those files too much so as to slow down the page from coming up on people's browsers.

One question though. I downloaded a trial of Xara Extreme, and all the little "Globe" icons in XWD next to each page when I open the site in XWD changed. (They look like a little page with a pencil with an X on the page.)
Even after I deleted the trial, they still changed again and now look like a little box. When I click on them, the pages do open normally. Is there any reason for this?

One more thing. Are you famiar with the OpenOffice software? It saves work in a strange format called SXD I believe and those documents cannot be imported in XWD. Is there any way they can? Steve