Anti-aliased text as transparent GIFs
Apparently anti-aliasing improves the appearance of text with a matte (background) color, so if you are trying to make transparent gifs of just text, anti-aliasing will actually make your exported gif look much worse than the original in your graphics editor. It seems the only way to do this is to export/save with a matte color for the text to blend with, just make sure it matches the color you are placing the image on.
screenshot from Fireworks export preview window
Another counterintuitive element to this task is setting the level of anti-aliasing. More is not better in this case. I exported two GIFs; one with crisp anti-aliasing and the other with smooth (smooth being the smoothest, crisp is usually rougher than smooth), and crisp looked better. So in these cases, using less anti-aliasing makes for better images.
Edited on Jan 19 2007 03:37PM by Nikolai Barnwell
