Text boxes with transparent shadow edges

**Newbietoo** · 14 July 2007, 05:02 AM

Me Again!...

I'm now starting to do slicing in anger (literally as it turns out) and have discovered that the sizes of the exported images are different to the Guide boxes with the net result the edges don't align (see attached image).

Paul (hope you're still there) I note that the same thing happens with your "slicetest" For example, the bottom right hand GIF is sized at 22.4px X 21.1px in Xara, but the exported GIF is 24 X23

In other threads I note a general level of dissatisfaction with Xara's slicing functionality. It's appallingly documented in the Help and seems to have a whole host of traps lurking for the unaware. Is this as good as it gets i.e. should I use some other package; or am I still doing something wrong?

Patrick

**Egg Bramhill** · 14 July 2007, 07:43 AM

Patrick,

I'd say your missing out something for your sliced image to be that badly out, but that said I've always had problems with Xtremes slicing.

Perhaps you and a few others could test this xar out for me?

**pauland** · 14 July 2007, 11:33 AM

Hi Patrick & Egg,

Patrick: My quick slice example should have had pixel perfect dimensions, so some anomlies can be expected in sizes.

Egg: I also get the extra pixel and I really can't see why. Your dimensions and positions are pixel perfect and there are no lines involved. Preview looks great in ie and firefox.

Perhaps someone from Xara can explain?

(In practice, I tend to do mostly corners and don't fuss too much about pixel perfect. I fix up any one pixel problems using paintshop pro and also use that to crop thin slices.)

Paul

**remi** · 14 July 2007, 01:07 PM

All you can do is to forget Xara Xtreme for such slicing tasks.

Instead, I would recommend the following steps:

Select your irregular shape and export it as PNG with transparency.
Open your Bitmap editor (Photoshop or the Freeware Photoshop-Clone Artweaver) and slice the image with the better slicing functionality of your bitmap editor (see the hardcopy from Artweaver).

Remi

**pauland** · 14 July 2007, 01:26 PM

Unsurprisingly fireworks is also rather good at this and is probably more intuitive in some ways (slice, then name the slices).

Paul

**remi** · 14 July 2007, 01:31 PM

And not to forget Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Flash. But the slicing functionality in our beloved Xara Xtreme is old-fashioned - unfortunately.

Remi

**David O'Neil** · 14 July 2007, 04:01 PM

Just thought I'd add that Real Draw has a kick-ass image slicer, that is even capable of creating a few different types of rollover effects automatically. I haven't tried Fireworks, Adobe, or other packages to compare it to, but the RD slicer blew me away. I thought it was almost worth the cost of Real Draw by itself. (For professional graphics, Xara wins hands-down, although it doesn't have some of RD's neat brush/bitmap abilities.)

**Egg Bramhill** · 14 July 2007, 04:23 PM

Cheers all. I must admit I agree with Remi and the rest of you regarding the slicing. Fortunately it's a thing I never require but there's a definite bug in there somewhere.

**Newbietoo** · 15 July 2007, 01:41 AM

Guys,

Thanks for all your help on this; I am now pretty convinced we are contending with a bug here. However, just to make sure I wonder if you could test my drawing to see if you get the same results I do. I've attached both the source drawing and the resultant images I get. I'm now pursuing this issue in the context of confirming whether in fact we have identified a bug and need to let Xara know.

If it is a bug, then it's a critical one given Xara positions itself squarely in the web graphics space. Resizable boxes et al (for which slicing is an essential technique) are becoming a ubiqutous technique in the world of Web 2.0 and the dramatic increase in the use of things like Ajax for "popup" data for example. In this case we're not talking re-sizing images in the traditional sense e.g. photo-images; not Xara's strong suite anyway, but drawings and what I suggest will be an ever increasing need to do that,

Now to my example...

When the HTML is viewed everything is OK, but that's not what counts in this case as you need to use eight individual PNG's to enable automatically re-sizing boxes. For example, the "centre" images are 1px wide in the drawing, but when exported end up at 3px; that's a 300% variation! While the centre images are less critical in this exercise it does dramatically illustrate the problem. The corner images are also wrong and they need to be pixel perfect.

So, I'd really appreciate it Egg and Paul if you could check to see if you get the same results I do (NB: I'm exporting PNG's)

Thanks,
Patrick

**Egg Bramhill** · 15 July 2007, 03:25 AM

Hi Patrick,

The problem that you're experiencing is not a bug.

It's because whilst your guides are in whole pixels width and height wise, they are misplaced in the x and y co-ordinate spacing. This is why you're getting the very large errors.

See the attached xar file.