Re: File size of .gifs

Hi Scott & list,
> I made images in 24bit color (16m colors) in PaintShop, and put my
>antialiased text in there, and everything, and then I reduced the colors to
>24 colors (which is still 8bit, but that's all I can do), and save it as a
>transparent gif.  It still comes out to about 2k. !!  What am I not doing
>(or doing) that is the difference.

It's not your fault - it's Paint Shop Pro's! Try opening up one of your
saved files in Notepad. If you scroll across a little way, you will see that
most of the file is taken up by some silly header information along the
lines of:
!!!"""###$$$%%%&&&'''((()))***+++,,,---...///000111... etc.

This is a Paint Shop Pro "feature", and I wonder how many other graphics
packages it afflicts? I tried opening up one of the Intel graphics and then
saving out from PSP. It came out at 2.02Kb from 670 bytes (approx). Note
that if you decrease the colour depth to 16 colours, PSP doesn't seem to do
this and the file-size is nice and small. I would recommend that you use
16-colour GIFs for text-oriented menus if possible - that's plenty of
colours for anti-aliasing text unless you really *are* a pedant... :)


HTH - Alastair
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Lightning Web Design
www.alastair.force9.co.uk
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