User guide

226 Colour, Fills, and Transparency
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 publications and publications with depth and snap. PagePlus fully
supports variable transparency and lets you apply solid, gradient, or bitmap
transparencies easily.
You can also 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. (Transparency is also an option with the 3D
Pattern Map filter effect.)
• 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.