[Gimp-user] Font quality in GIF files

[saulgoode at flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com]

Quoting Amit Ramon <amit.ramon at gmail.com>:

> Technically, as far as I understand, there should be no problem to   
> have a good
> anti-aliased fonts in a gif file. The problem is with the very specific
> method I (or gimp?) creates the gif.
>
> Does anyone here knows how can one create a decent anti-aliased text in gif
> file?

The unfortunate answer is that it cannot be done; there is,  
technically, a problem with anti-aliasing text over a transparent  
background. GIF implements transparency by specifying a single color  
in the colormap to be transparent. They (CompuServe?) could have  
defined the GIF file format to treat a range of indexes in the palette  
to represent varying levels of transparency, but they did not. There  
is nothing the GIMP can do to overcome this limitation of the GIF  
format.

The PNG format DOES support an alpha channel, even in Index Mode; so  
you might see if that meets your needs.

One thing to note is that converting to Indexed Mode in the GIMP will  
alias your layers even if the background of the image is not  
transparent. However, if you remain in RGB Mode and let the GIF save  
plug-in perform the Indexed conversion, the fonts will be anti-aliased  
properly (alternately, you could Merge the layers or flatten the image  
in RGB Mode and then convert the result to Indexed Mode).

It is not ideal that the GIMP assumes the transparency limitation of  
the GIF format in its Indexed Mode editing but it is an understandably  
low priority problem. Discussions continue on how best (or even  
whether) to handle indexed images but it is unlikely that any changes  
will occur in the near future.