Chapter 22
Strategies for Webmastering

Featuring

This chapter explores two distinct paths, and the one that will be most salient to you has to do not only with the kind of Web site you want to create, but also your very philosophy about the World Wide Web.

The distinction comes down to this: are you turning to DRAW to create graphics for Web pages, or do you want DRAW to create the Web pages themselves? DRAW can handle either task, and each strategy will get airtime in this chapter. But to many, this question cuts right to the core of the essential nature of a Web page. Is a Web page a single entity, like a brochure, or is it a collection of elements? Do you design a Web page, or do you program one?

Ultimately, you do a bit of both, and that is one of the reasons why millions of DRAW users have turned their creative energy to the Web with such zeal. This chapter explores with more detail the ways that DRAW can best be used to create Web graphics and Web pages, before concluding with some general and wandering commentary. It is not for beginners.

Exporting Graphics: CanDRAWPassMuster?

The two previous chapters explored in-depth how and why you create your artwork in DRAW and export it to one of the two popular Web formats, GIF or JPEG. In this chapter, we will look at why you might not want to do that. And we’ll spoil the punch line and just tell you this:

All by itself, DRAW might not be good enough.

Your eyes will ultimately be judge and jury, but if you’re like most discerning graphic designers, you are likely to find DRAW’s output deficient with certain types of graphics. Fortunately, the solution for this comes in the box, in the form of Corel PHOTO-PAINT, but first, the problem.

Figure 22.1 shows a close-up of a logo used at altman.com. We want to point out three things about it:

•  The background is one uniform color—there is no outline.

•  The bar at the bottom is also a solid color, and there is no shading or tinting intended between the two. One color meets the other.

•  The white lettering is small but sharp and readable.

FIGURE 22.1  This simple logo has uncovered some not-so-simple issues with DRAW’s GIF export.

We exported this file as an anti-aliased GIF file and opened it in PHOTO-PAINT. Here is what we saw when we zoomed in:

If you’re not used to seeing close-ups of anti-aliasing, you might be startled at the appearance of the lettering, but actually, DRAW does a pretty good job of rendering it. (At the correct size, the jagged lettering will look smooth.) Our concern is what we see along the perimeter of the graphic: DRAW added anti-aliasing all the way around the edges, and above the dark bar spanning the bottom—as if there could be jaggies along straight lines!

This sparked quite a debate during development. When we complained about DRAW’s propensity for blurring the straight lines of our test images, Corel’s engineers defended their position. “It is true our anti-aliasing will anti-alias straight lines also,” responded one of them. “That is the correct method for anti-aliasing lines. Horizontal and vertical lines do not always lie on a pixel’s edge or on a pixel’s center and our anti-aliasing is actually more accurate because it indicates exactly what percentage of the pixel it occupies.

“The blurring in these cases is not just to handle fractional pixel positions. The process of rendering anything to a bitmap involves starting with the continuous, mathematical representation of the object, low-pass filtering it, and sampling. Therefore, a correctly anti-aliased image will never have infinitely sharp edges in it, even in cases where a line is exactly on a pixel center.

“I call it a feature and not a bug.”

We can’t speak to this issue in such technical terms; it is beyond our comprehension and probably most of our readers. We only know what our eyes tell us: when we visit professionally created Web sites, we see clean and sharp graphics that have effective anti-aliasing around curves, but not along the four edges of the graphic. If Corel is right about the rules of anti-aliasing, a lot of Webmasters are breaking the rules, and many in their audience prefer it that way.

In Pursuit of Cleaner Graphics

First off, you may not find Corel’s interpretation of anti-aliasing to be objectionable. (It is much better than in previous years—last year, DRAW would place a white dot in the corners of GIF and JPEG files.) It’s possible that your graphics will be shown at a small enough size to make the blurred lines insignificant.

Nonetheless, you should know how to make them better. And Corel’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, we find PHOTO-PAINT to be a smarter tool than DRAW for exporting bitmap graphics.

Here are various DRAW-to-PAINT strategies that you can try in search of this electronic holy grail. Our instructions here assume that you either know your way around PHOTO-PAINT or have already read Chapters 24 and 25.

Use PAINT for Clean-Up

If you are not satisfied with the appearance of the graphics you create in DRAW, open them in PAINT and clean them up. In the case of unwanted lines produced by the anti-aliasing effect, you can embark on what we like to call the Search and Destroy mission:

1.  Open the graphic in PAINT.

2.  Zoom way in so you can see, and easily click on, the pixels that make up the lines of unwanted colors.

3.  Use PAINT’s Eyedropper and Color Replacer tools to replace the unwanted color with the color of the graphic. This is like using Search and Replace, but in PAINT instead of in your word processor:

•  With the Eyedropper tool, click on the unwanted color, then Alt+click on the correct color.

•  Switch to the Color Replacer tool and click and drag across the unwanted color—it will turn into the correct color.