Re: grayscaling

Pam:

>Now I want to try grayscaling my colors again.
>Am I safe doing this? Will my pages "look"
> the same when viewed with IE,
>NN, or WebTV (assuming the browsers are latest upgrades).

The quick and dirty answer here is ... "Probably not!!".

I used to have a client that sold advertising using silk-screening on large
metal signs. He could never seem to understand that the actual color that
ended up on his signs would be determined by how the silk-screener mixed the
inks.

He used to take a digital copy of my art to his office and print it out with
a inexpensive ink jet printer. Then he would drive me nuts with "color
changes" to match his ink jet. Of course the silk-screener's copies were
black and white to be used for making the "negatives".

Here we have a similar problem in that no matter how "safe" your color
choice may be, it will come down in it's most final form, to the monitor and
video card of each individual who views the web page.  And yes, it's true,
IE and Netscape may make a difference as well. So will the operating system
and, or that matter, the manufacturing run of the hardware used by that
operating system. Example: There is often--but not always--a very noticeable
difference in the brightness of an image between Mac and PC.

You may have read the thread about fonts and topographic manipulation that
also ran over the last day or so. Fonts, colors and images all share the
same problem in comparison to the "print media". HTML simply does not
provide for the control of the details or the finished product like one was
used to having with "hard copy" printing.

Example: You could go into Canvas, Quark Express or PageMaker and change the
kerning, character width and height, slant and lots more. However, unless
you converted this text to a graphic, there is no way in HTML to maintain
these changes. Sadly, the same holds true for fonts. The viewer's machine
must have the font installed before it can render it.

So--we must learn to design our pages as generic as possible--consistent
with artistic taste and still present the information contained in an
understandable way. All within the unforgivable limits of downloading time.
You will find that you will always spend more time on these compromises than
we do one the actual HTML.

Best wishes
Ted Temer
Temercraft Designs Redding, CA
temer(at)c-zone.net
www.temercraft.com/
www.newsredding.com/


>
> A question about grayscaling colors.
>
> The majority of my pages are built with WebTV but aren't limited to
> WebTV users. When I first designed my pages I used a grayscale for
> background and text colors, i.e. add 111111, 222222, or 333333 to the
> hexdecimal to get the desired effect. Since so many browsers interpret
> colors differently -- Long ago I viewed one of my pages on Netscape 3;
> the vivid violet background appeared a dirty brown -- I've stuck with
> the 216 "safe" colors. Now I want to try grayscaling my colors again.
> Am I safe doing this? Will my pages "look" the same when viewed with IE,
> NN, or WebTV (assuming the browsers are latest upgrades).
>
>
> Thanks for helping out.
>
>
> Pam
>
>

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