On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 07:58:35PM +0100, RalfGesellensetter wrote:

Hello all,

for several times I managed to create animations witb Gimp 2.2. Especially nice are web animations (GIF) which are easily done with GIMP.

Now, for the first time, GIMP's outcome is different from what I expect. Is it a feature or a bug that partly transparent layers are not shown in the animation preview box? I put an example to

http://www.skolelinux.de/~ralf/artwork/animations/

forgive me, i have not looked at the animation yet. even without looking (however) i can tell you that gif is either completely transparent or completely painted. there is no inbetween, unless you are one of those people who has purchased or obtained the propietary gif libraries which use (i think) something that i can only imagine to be a layered color set up.

the gifs that average users like you (maybe) and me have one 256 color palette. one of the color positions can be used for transparency leaving 255 colors and 1 no color. the industry gif has 256 of those palettes to work with and can show various amounts of transparency.

btw, 256x256 is something close to 16 million, which is the number of colors that a jpeg uses. jpeg however does not know transparency.

so there you go. it is not gimp that cannot make your animation transparent, it is the library they allow you to have and for your software to use to make and view gif with.

mng works. i am certain that one day a browser will be made that can display mng. especially if we can make a community of interested people who want to deliver free software to actual users. until such a software project exists, you can search the bug reports of the different browser projects to see what has happened there.

carol

Hi,

RalfGesellensetter writes:

for several times I managed to create animations witb Gimp 2.2. Especially nice are web animations (GIF) which are easily done with GIMP.

Now, for the first time, GIMP's outcome is different from what I expect. Is it a feature or a bug that partly transparent layers are not shown in the animation preview box?

All of the pixels in your partly transparent layers have an alpha value below 127, they are more transparent than opaque. Since GIF only supports binary transparency, these pixels all end up being transparent in the animation.

The Animation Playback plug-in simulates GIF transparency. If someone wants to come up with a patch that adds a check button to enable/disable this feature, that would be a welcomed contribution.

Sven