Text boxes with transparent shadow edges

[Xhris]

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?

Hmm, I thought I could smell a bug. But there are two issues. One I suspect is related to how you drew the shapes with snapping features - which I'm covering in a new tutorial soon. But there's something definitely also wrong with Xara here in addition. The error is either or both due to placement with grid snapping on, or to do with snapping when objects are being drawn (if theres even a distinction). There is an inaccuracy somewhere that is causing misalignment in certain situations, leaving gaps on slicing.

[pauland]

Seems to me that Eggs example is bullet-proof. All his shapes are on whole pixel boundaries and the dimensions are in whole pixels, in addition his shapes don't have any outlines, so no line width issues to consider.

Given Eggs excellent example I don't see how snapping would be an issue.

Time and time again, people (myself included) come a cropper in using Xara for web work and using (OK, it's our own fault in some ways) fractional pixel values.

Wouldn't it be great if there was an option that said "Force whole pixel values" so that positions would always be on whole pixels and dimensions would always be whole pixel units?

Paul

[haakoo]

Hi,

Put in Utilities
grid to 100pix
subdivisions to 100

when you create a rectangle say 300x300pix
move it across canvas with grid enabled,you'll see it always snaps to whole pixels

Hans

[Newbietoo]

Thanks Egg for going to that trouble...that's really clarified it for me. Said like that it's obvious (but before that it wasn't!). I have learned to be sensitive to X and Y in getting fonts pixel perfect, however when experimenting with images, it's never made a discernable difference (I'm talking 0.1-0.2 pixels here)...in anything I was doing anyway. For these images I was snapping to as line, but not fine enough obviously

Clearly that has just caught up with me.

If I'd been out by fractions of pixels I might have sussed it, but 2 or 3, nuh! the 1 pixel width BTW is at the instance of my Web App developer..I'm just the navvie who owns the company and he is a "gun" as we say in Oz (a euphemism for very good), so I do what I'm told. He has a reason for the 1px, but I can't recall right now what it was; it had sounded pretty anal to me too. Emboldened by your comments in the drawing I might take it up with him again!

Thanks too, Xhris, Paul and Haakoo!

Patrick

[pauland]

1 pixel wide (or high) images are commonly used as background repeating images. They just need to be one pixel wide and are repeated as many times as needed to fill the container they are in. At one pixel they will have the smallest possible file size.

Paul

[Newbietoo]

Yes that's the reason! Thanks Paul, although for my current exercise it may not be that critical, but I recall now that the original slicing I did, over a year ago now and not using the "export slices" option, was for Tabs that were much smaller

Anyway Egg, seems I spoke to soon, I did as you suggested and still get oversized images. I also tried your example and your 20 X 20 images end up 21 X 20 when exported

[Egg Bramhill]

Yes newbietoo theres a defenite bug in the Xtreme Slicing. To avoid this just export each portion as a gif one at a time. Xtreme wont mess up the size in the odd way it does if you use image slicing.

[Xhris]

Yes newbietoo theres a defenite bug in the Xtreme Slicing. To avoid this just export each portion as a gif one at a time. Xtreme wont mess up the size in the odd way it does if you use image slicing.

It doesn't always mess up though. It all depends on how you draw your shapes. I wouldn't give up immediately; keep moving the shapes around with grid snapping on; drag from the left to the right, and vice versa, same for top to bottom until there are no slicing errors. If that doesn't work, re-jig the size and back. I'm sure the bug will be addressed at some point.

[Newbietoo]

I'm afraid I've run the white flag up on this one. I downloaded and tried slicing in Inkscape and it works like a charm. Makes you realise just how hard Xara has made it.


Thanks Again Guys
Patrick