Freitag, 11. August 2006

16:36

Some text with PNG-overlay and some text with GIF-overlay **.

Some text with PNG-overlay and some text with GIF-overlay ** .

Erstellt mit Microsoft Office OneNote 2003,
dem elektronischen Notizblock

End of OneNote produced MHTL with insertion of a PNG.

As you can see, the text behind the GIF (right) is nearly unreadable (the smaller the text font the worse) whereas the text behind the PNG is really easy to read.

As some browsers cannot display it correctly, on the right you can see a screenshot of how it shall look like. The last 2 lines (with ** at the end) are text in this html file, so you can select it with the mouse, whereas the first line is text inside one of the 2 GIF images.

Beginning of full text of my suggestion to Microsoft

This is what I typed in at https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/CreateFeedbackForm.aspx?FeedbackFormConfigurationID=203&FeedbackType=2
resulting in https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=179465
Suggestion Description
A lot of applications offer document annotation with highlithers etc (especiable useful for Tablet PC users), eg Microsoft OneNote. Those apps often ONLY offer "save as MHTML" in order to export annotations seperated from annotated document to a standard document format. "only" is in capital letters as it makes it important that this export is of usable quality.

Until now, the background text (eg scanned document in gif/png/jpeg/...) was one layer in front of that a layer containing the highlighting which HAD to be gif as png with transparency was not supported by IE6. As you can see in the attached MHTML file (which you are reading right now), gif highlights make marked text quite difficult to read (the smaller the font size the worse) as highlighting is realised as chess board structure: 100% opaque color x transparent x 100% opaque color x ..... which means 50% of all background is completely invisible!

Reproduction
Open OneNote (or any other application for that purpose), highlight any text, choose file-save as-webpage and open the resulting MHTL.

Expected
With a PNG (all pixels yellow but 40-60% transparent) no text of background is "lost" due to 100% opaque color pixels like in GIF. Highlighted text is fine to read, see attached MHTML file (which you are reading right now). Thus collaboration is much better (no requests "What the hell is the text below highlight?? I can't read it!")

Dear IE7 team: Please talk to OneNote team, Document Imaging team,... and make them use MHTL Export with PNGs instead of GIFs (shall be quite easy for them), maybe let users choose between GIF and PNG (2 radioboxes in "save as" dialogue). Would be important to get that feature as an update for Office2003 as this is the only OneNote release on the market as of now.

Would be nice to talk to "foreign" product teams like franklin covey plan plus team as well, but I know that is demanding very much...

Georg at 17:28 11.08.2006