Problem with mask

[Wilhelm Sanke]

Phil Jimmieson phil at liverpool.ac.uk wrote:

> Hi Wilhelm,
> if you take the %22 off the end of the link to the rev document, it  
> works from here. The link to http://home.infostations.net/jhurley/  
> also works from here.



The dreadful appearance of my post with three repeated links that 
contain %22 has been caused by our university mail program. These 
repeated links were not part of my original post and also are not to be 
seen in my "sent mail" folder.

Apparently not all troubles we had with our mail program have been 
fixed. Two weeks ago one of my mails had been sent three times!

But when I try to access websites I use the direct DSL-connection from 
my home, and so far I did not experience any difficulties with other 
websites.

I still get the "timed out" alert, but no stack, and no access to Jim's 
website.

For Jim Hurley:

I had a closer look at the oval-mask tool of my stack "Photo 
Patchworks"  (which has been waiting to be completed since several 
months), because I dimly remembered now there had been a problem with 
"edges" similar to Jim's, too.

The edges appeared when using a template mask image that had been 
"trimmed" right until the edge of the transparency, and especially when 
the corresponding selection graphic (to which the template mask is then 
sychronised) was scaled to a longer vertical or horizontal shape or when 
the oval was somewhat more decreased in size.

My solutions were twofold:

- I created an oval-mask template with two extra transparent pixels 
around the borders of the rect of the png.
- I created a mask with a very small transitional area between 
transparency and opacity.

No edges appear using such masks.

I still have to experiment with Ken's and Bernd's examples to see if 
what they propose could also be applied to the various routines I use in 
"Photo Patchworks".

By the way, for creating the template images for the 6 different shapes 
of the selection graphics, I use the Windows tool "RealDraw Pro" 
<www.mediachance.com> a non-expensive program suited - among a lot of 
other possibilities - to easily produce transparency-transition areas of 
varying sizes.--

I hope that this time our mail server will send my post in its original 
form.

Regards,

Wilhelm Sanke
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>