h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Does anyone know how I can create relatively small gif files which contain legible text? Whenever I try I get such heavy aliasing that I might as well have applied pixels with a pepper pot.

Grunt?

Okay. First, it is important to use the right font. This is especially problematic if you need small text.

Times, Times New Roman, and Arial are designed for regular paragraph-style text. They were originally designed to be easy to read when printed, buyt they also work on the internet. Georgia and Verdana are two others that were designed to be easily readable on computer screens.

Courier, Helvetica, MS Serif, MS Sans Serif, and System are fonts designed for really tiny text. They look horrible large. But they may look unusually clean and crisp if you need very small text.

Fonts designed for large headline-style text include Copperplate, Gill Sans, Impact, and Rockwell. These are guaranteed to look awful small.

Now then. You must create a blank graphics file with millions of colors to start with. Make sure the background color is the same as the background color the web page will be, or else there will be problems. Then hoose a font and put your text on the background.

Now reduce the number of colors in the graphic. You can typically go to 16 colors if your graphic is for the internet only and has nothing but text on it. Otherwise, experiment to see how few you can get away with. If you know how, set the background color as transparent. Then save the file in .gif format.

In general, large text should be anti-aliased. For very small text, you should use the alias feature available in all good graphics programs. I hope that helps!

Also, don't resize the image: start with the correct size.

Good point. Thanks for adding that.

Thank You Gentle Folk. That gives me what I needed.