Text boxes with transparent shadow edges

**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.

**Xhris** · 15 July 2007, 04:35 AM

Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

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** · 15 July 2007, 01:29 PM

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** · 15 July 2007, 01:50 PM

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