I have a number of links on my pages that I use an image (button) for. Presently, I'm creating the .gif files in a rather labor-intensive manner, and would like to find something to produce these .gif files more easily, without sacrificing design flexibility.

Currently, I hand-edit a PostScript file to draw the buttons just the way I want them (in Ghostscript/Ghostview), cut and paste over to The GIMP image editor, change the background color to transparent, slice and dice the arrays of buttons into individual files, and scale them down. This is unsatisfactory because of the time involved and the resulting quality isn't that great. For example, I have to spend a good deal of time on every button (they're ovals) to pick out all the pixels (fringing the edge) with some background color and change them to transparent. This also results in a rougher-than-I'd-like shape to the resulting button. (Can GhostScript be told not to anti-alias lines and curves?)

Is GIF transparency all-or-nothing? Button edges would be a lot smoother if there could be partial transparency. Does anyone know how to use GIMP to remove the background all in one go, without leaving behind a fringe of semi-colored pixels that have to be attacked by hand? Every time I've tried to select by color, it messes up the other colors that are to stay in place.

Producing on PostScript gives me minute control of font and placement (as well as easily producing additional buttons from a script function), but the act of cutting and pasting over to GIMP and then scaling has never produced satisfactory results. Especially troublesome is when I can't get button alignment precisely right because I can't get alignment on pixels the same for each button. Scaling effects also contribute to bluriness in text.

Anyway, are there any nice button image editors out there? Something free (or cheap) that produces buttons in GIF, PNG, or JPEG with transparent edges, and gives me exact control over what's produced (preferably not only selecting from a list of styles)? I don't want to use Flash or anything like that -- just standard format images. Failing that, any suggestions on how to do this better with PostScript and GIMP? I'm worried about using PNG with transparency because of poor support in IE6 browsers.

Thanks for any suggestions! 
Phil

Yes, navigation buttons like those.

I do start out with a close background color, but I'd like to have the ability to put the buttons on any background. So, there shouldn't be any trace of the original background. With my current method, the problem is that there is anti-aliasing to "bleed" the border into the background. The pixels are the background + border color in varying amounts. When I use The GIMP's transparency tool, only the 100% background color get changed to transparent, and the rest have to be selected and changed to transparent by hand. Unfortunately, that is not only labor-intensive, but also tends to produce a slightly irregular border, as there's no smooth blend. My understanding is that GIF is "all or nothing" on transparency and JPEG doesn't have transparency (?), and while PNG has varying amounts of transparency, IE6 supports it poorly.

I tried rendering in Ghostview/Ghostscript with "1 bit" anti-aliasing (rather than the default 4 bits) and didn't see any substantial difference. I was hoping that it would draw nice crisp edges, but it didn't (possibly due to Point-to-pixel mapping?).

I suspect that part of the problem is that I'm doing the drawing in PostScript, and 1) there's not a good mapping from Big Points to screen pixel resolution, and 2) cut and paste into The GIMP (at yet another resolution?) is compounding the problem. If I could figure out how to get PostScript to draw onto exact screen pixels, then perhaps the image would cut and paste smoothly into The GIMP, and getting rid of the background would be clean and easy. Reading the GS FAQs, it appears that GIF support was removed when Unisys started enforcing its LZW patent. The patent has expired, but I don't see anything about GIF output going back in. That would be the best of all worlds for me -- scriptable graphics, wide choice of fonts, and with direct GIF output.

Has anyone had experience with aligning PostScript (Ghostview/Ghostscript) exactly on pixels, and turning off antialiasing so I don't have to turn semi-transparent pixels into fully transparent? Thanks much!

Thanks for the suggestion. Paint.NET can certainly do some cool effects, but I don't think it's what I'm looking for. 1) It requires that I download and install .NET 2.0, 2) It doesn't sound like it's scriptable, so I can make a minor change to a flat file and rerun everything at once, rather than doing each operation by hand, 3) many of the tutorials seem to be broken (missing images, 404s). Is there any advantage to Paint.Net over The GIMP or Photoshop?

Maybe I should read up on GIMP's "Script-Fu" (I think that's the name of it). That might let me produce cleaner graphics with scripting. It will have to wait, as I've got a lot of other stuff on my plate right now.