Visual and Code

I like the new effects that Office 2007 brought on, like reflection and soft shadows. I use that sometimes to make nice presentations or for images in documents. Totally Art-deco, but still nice ;-)

So, the other day, I pimped my company’s PowerPoint template a bit with among others a part from our logo with reflection, shadows, and rotation. I also wanted to put this thing onto the webpage as an image. And since the webpage only have gradient background images, I needed to keep the transparency information. But how?

First idea was to screen shot the image and then transform the back color to a transparency. This turned out ok, using Gimp’s function “Color to Alpha”.

Better yet, copy-paste the object to your favorite paint program (Paint.Net). But this also required me to fake the alpha info.

But then! If I copied the object to Word, put it inside a Drawing Canvas, and then, copied it and pasted it into Paint.Net I got the alpha channel intact! The problem here is to get the object inside the drawing canvas. Copy the object, make sure canvas is large enough, then select the canvas, and past the object. Repeat until success.

But hey, I couldn’t get it to work just now. I added a second object, a square. I selected both and then copied. Worked some.

Moved the X next to the square and selected it. Didn’t work.

Selected both the X and the square, but with the X at the side. Worked. At last!

Got it!