Icons or Transparent Bitmaps 2

[Stretchwickster]

Hi people,

I have a webpage which has a load of items in a navigation frame. When I add a new item I want to add a little "NEW" icon or bitmap with a yellow font colour and a transparent background. I can't seem to make a bitmap have a transparent background - how can I achieve this? As an alternative I was testing my pages offline and loaded an ico file instead which I can set a transparent background for. This was exactly what I was after but now that I've uploaded it, it doesn't seem to recognise the ico file.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Your help would be much appreciated!

Clive

http://www.kucu.co.uk

Ex nihilo, nihil fit (Out of nothing, nothing comes)

 

[dwarfthrower]

You need a .gif file rather than a .bmp (doesn't support transparency) or a .ico (not really a web image format). Nearly all graphics packages will let you create a file as a gif.

Gif files have 256 colours. The transparency is achieved by setting one colour in the pallete to be transparent, so pick a colour that your graphic won't use - bright purple or something - and set that colour to be transparent.

 

[MrBelfry]

You can also use png's for transparent backgrounds. These support millions of colours -> you might not need that many colours for a button though!

I've had some problems with pngs. Sometimes the colours will look different in different browsers. Anybody else seen this?

MrBelfry

 

[Stretchwickster]

Cheers for the answers people! A .gif worked a treat - cheers dwarfthrower - a star for you!

Clive

http://www.kucu.co.uk

Ex nihilo, nihil fit (Out of nothing, nothing comes)