Transparent text and photoshop

1

hello!
in the new site layout i’m working on, i want to be able to globably change colors using CSS. so… i’ve got a few pieces of text (headings) that i want to be able to save as transparent gifs, and have them look good against a variety of different colors. (example: white text against a black, red, brown, or grey backgrounds)

i know in PS7 in the “save for web” option, you can select a matte color, to make sure the text comes out crisp… but that means the text will always have a slight colored outline.

and if you DONT save it with that… boy does the text look jagged and UGYLY!

**are there any other options for gettting clear, crisp text that looks good against a variety of differnt background colors, without going to 100% html text? **

the other suggestion i’ve gotten is to look into PNG format… but i dont know that much about that image format - like browser support. anythoughts on that? (guess i’ll start googling it now…)

2

Well you’re not going to get what you want with GIFs. What PNGs have that GIFs do not is partial transparency making those smooth lines possible. You’re pretty much stuck with GIF. PNG last time I checked is not very well supported by most browsers. I know mozilla based browsers can handle them but I’m pretty sure Internet Explorer can not.

3

If your site supports PHP you could generate the images on the fly. PHP GD libary supports *.png transparency overlayed onto another image/backgroud colour.

You can overlay any True Type font. Each time the page loads you could make the server generate them, or perhaps if the colour only changes every so often make it save the images to the host server and reuse them.

You couldn’t really mix it too well with CSS, but it’s an idea.