Problem Creating Seamless Fills - help needed!

[handrawn]

as i read the first post, both those options were tried... but what does that option do Egg? presumably it applies locally just to those bitmaps so created, is that right?

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Handrawn,
The help file explains it thus:
Anti-aliasing

Anti-aliasing improves the appearance of graphics by smoothing jagged edges:

• Maintain Screen Anti-aliasing: The exported bitmap uses the exact same positioning as shown on screen, and so has identical anti-aliasing. This can result in the edges of objects being slightly blurred because they do not fall exactly on pixel boundaries.

• Minimize Visible Anti-aliasing: This will slightly reposition the objects by fractions of a pixel to minimize the anti-aliasing around the edge of the exported bitmap. If in doubt which option to use, select this.

[handrawn]

... that implies that the setting only takes effect when exporting a bitmap [what I would have expected] - so what happens if you then reimport it?.... hummm....

[Egg Bramhill]

Don't understand your question Handrawn.

[handrawn]

the exported bitmap

exported from where.. from the xara program presumbly - if you were to make a bitmap copy within xara would that bitmap copy have minimised anti-aliasing whilst it remained in xara, or only once it had been exported?

if you were to export a bitmap with the minimised anti aliasing and you reimported it would the global settings of the xara UI over-ride ?

in other words - how helpful is this when working within xara?

[Gamerprinter]

Generally when I am creating seamless textures, the intent is that I export the file, then import right back as I'd be using the seamless texture in Xara itself. I only ever use image editors to tweak colors, brightness, contrast, etc. I generally don't use image editors to do actual work, only for tweaking existing work. Even with those seamless textures I create in Xara and sometimes needing to crop the image to get rid of the anti-aliased straight edge, I'm not intending to use the seamless texture anywhere other than in Xara.

[handrawn]

why export it and then reimport it? - does this give an advantage over making an internal bitmap copy?

what do you use to crop to get rid of the anti-aliased edge? - can you do that in xara?

[Egg Bramhill]

The reduce anti-aliasing works on both "export" (jpg, gif etc), to create a external copy & "create bitmap copy" for an internal copy. I very rarely have issues with edges. If I do one thing I tendto do is create a clone of the original shapes you want to export, put to back and give it a single 0.5pix external contour. Then export the original shapes, not the contoured version behind. This just ensures the export has a similar background. However this should never really be necessary.

Perhaps Blues player could post his xar file that's displaying this problem?

[handrawn]

yes good idea - that's a variant on what we used to [still have to] do with gif's when exporting because of the limited colour palette

I don't make seamless tiles, I never have any issues with anti-aliasing 24/32 bit colour depth images normally, just trying to get a handle on it in context - thanks

[Gamerprinter]

why export it and then reimport it? - does this give an advantage over making an internal bitmap copy?

what do you use to crop to get rid of the anti-aliased edge? - can you do that in xara?

Because some of my maps are intended for print at 24" x 36" at 300 ppi, I require 300 ppi seamless textures, not 96 ppi. There probably is no advantage, rather its just how I do it. Of course, I may also want to use the seamless texture at some future date, so I want to save it to my textures directory for that purpose.