Download PagePlus X3 User Guide

Colour, Fills, and Transparency
199
Working with transparency
Transparency effects are great for highlights, shading and shadows, and
simulating "rendered" realism. They can make the critical difference between
flat-looking illustrations and images with depth and snap. PagePlus fully
supports variable transparency and lets you apply gradient or bitmap
transparencies to create your own 32-bit, anti-aliased images. You can export
transparent graphics as GIFs, PNGs, or TIFs and preserve transparency effects
in both your printed output and your Web pages.
Transparencies work rather like fills that use "disappearing ink" instead of
colour. The more transparency in a particular spot, the more "disappearing"
takes place there, and the more the object(s) underneath show through. Just as a
gradient fill can vary from light to dark, a transparency can vary from more to
less, i.e. from clear to opaque, as in the illustration:
In PagePlus, transparency effects work very much like greyscale fills. Just like
fills...
• Transparency effects are applied from the Studio—in this case, using the
Transparency tab.
• The Transparency tab's gallery has thumbnails in shades of grey, where the
lighter portions represent more transparency. To apply transparency, you
click thumbnails or drag them onto objects.
• Most transparency effects have a path you can edit—in this case, with the
Transparency Tool.
As for the effects available on the Swatches tab, all are comparable to the fills of
the same name:
• Solid transparency distributes the transparency equally across the object.
• Gradient transparencies include linear, elliptical, and conical effects (each
thumbnail's tooltip identifies its category), ranging from clear to opaque.
• The Bitmap gallery includes texture maps based on the Swatches tab's
selection of bitmaps.