Transparent images

[cpns]

Is it possible to get EA to correctly display transparent bitmaps?

I have a number of PNG files with transparent backgrounds, but EA always displays the transparency as a solid colour. This makes all images look unattractively rectangular.

Clifford

[Oliver F.]

Is it possible to get EA to correctly display transparent bitmaps?

I have a number of PNG files with transparent backgrounds, but EA always displays the transparency as a solid colour. This makes all images look unattractively rectangular.

Which build are you using? I have filed such a bug some while ago for build 831 and had hoped that it would have been fixed in 7.5 (though I did not check yet).

Oliver

[cpns]

Which build are you using?

7.1.834.

I am downloading 7.5.844 right now. I'll try it.

[Eve]

EA doesn't yet support transparent png images.

[Oliver F.]

EA doesn't yet support transparent png images.

My bug report of february was answered that this is a known issue also reported by many others which Sparx is trying to fix. I even have sent in several png files to support fixing and got a thankful reply.
This was before the 7.5 release and personally I would consider this being an important fix. Reports given to customers and subcontractors do not look professional if elements have a background color.

Oliver

[cpns]

EA doesn't yet support transparent png images.

OK. That's an interesting way of answering the the question. I am surprised I have to ask, but how about transparent images in other formats?

Clifford

[cpns]

It would not be so bad if the transparent pixels were rendered white rather than black. At least then I could use transparent images and have them at least print to paper OK, and then also work on screen if transparency is later supported.

I have settled for white background images, and setting the screen paper to white and the gradient fill nonsense off - but it is not so easy on the eye, and those settings are for the workstation, not the project.

Thanks all for your responses. Enough time spent I think!

While on the subject, is there a way of forcing an image to maintain its aspect ration when resizing? In most applications this is none by holding shift or ctrl while dragging the handle.

Clifford

[«Midnight»]

I managed to get transparent backgrounds with either bitmaps or metafiles (the latter I think). [It was some time ago...]

(I think) The trade-off was that the images could not be scaled, or something like that. Not the worst problem you could have but an annoyance.

Support for image formats seems to be an issue throughout EA. What bothers me more though, is that the various limitations are not well documented. Different parts of EA seem (without documentation it is difficult to tell) to have different limitations. Things like bitmap handling for icons and images appear to be sensitive to bitmap format (i.e. newer high color definition), but not always in the same way.

Rant ends.

Sigh...

[cpns]

I am not sure that BMP supports transparency. I think the image library downloadable from EA are metafiles and if I recall correctly they have transparency.

I did try WMF/EMF, but it is probably that the PNG to WMF conversion method I used did not support transparency.