Re: UI design for Tk app--PNG's or GIF's for icons?

michael.kirkham@xxxxxxxxx writes:

On Jan 30, 7:06 am, Chris McDonald <c...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm confused here;

Indeed. :)

You may have seen some PNGs smoother than some GIFs, but I don't believe
that that is a property of the *encoding* format, merely the amount of
effort that the icon designers have gone to.

GIFs support only boolean transparency (a pixel is either fully
transparent or it isn't), so there can't be any real anti-aliasing
(thus jaggy edges). PNGs support an alpha channel, which allows any
pixel to be anywhere between fully transparent and fully opaque, which
blends much better. GIFs also only support 256 maximum colors in any
single image, which makes differences in colors between two pixels
much more apparent, even if they are similar (thus non-smooth
shading). PNGs support up to 65535 colors per *channel*, although Tk
only supports up to 256 per channel.

Thanks for the explanation Michael; so much to learn, so little time....

--
Chris.
.

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