[Mediawiki-l] Transparency of uploaded PNG images?

[Rowan Collins]

On 17/08/05, Morten Blaabjerg <morten at crewscut.com> wrote:
> Why won't MediaWiki apparently accept the transparency of uploaded .PNG images?
> 
> The transparency area is transformed to a solid grey or pinkish color :-(

When is this transformation taking place? I can think of two places it might be:
* when a thumbnail is generated (either for use on the description
page of a large image, or when including an image in an article with
|thumb| or |##px|); in which case, the problem is presumably with the
GD library (since you say you're not using ImageMagick). I'm afraid I
know nothing about this, so can go no further than this vague
diagnosis.

* on display in Internet Explorer, which can't cope with alpha-layer
transparency in PNGs, much to everyone's annoyance; this has nothing
to do with the image being uploaded to MediaWiki, but if you didn't
know this you might never have tested your PNGs in IE until you
uploaded them. There's not a lot to be done about this - you can edit
the PNGs to only have palette transparency (like a GIF; can be rather
ugly) or you can try and use the ActiveX filter hack that's used in
the logo (see skins/common/wikibits.js, I think; can annoy users with
restrictive ActiveX permissions)

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]