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See also: Why are some GIF or JPEG images not displayed in my Epub using Adobe Digital Editions?
If your book contains PNG images with transparency (either using a colour to denote transparency, or an alpha channel), you may be wondering if they will display correctly in ebook readers. Amazon will not preserve transparency except for small GIFs (see below). Most Epub readers will work fine with transparent images, for example Adobe Digital Editions and Bluefire.
However, by default all your images will be converted to JPEG anyway, so the transparency will be lost, unless you change configuration settings or set each image to use the original format.
If you want to use PNGs in the compiled book, you can edit your configuration(s) and set Convert images to JPEG to None, and ensure Flatten images is set to White - this will remove the transparency. Alternatively you can specify a background colour with this option, or specify that the background colour should be taken from the parent box or table's colour, if any, or white otherwise. However, even if you output PNGs to the book, Kindlegen will convert them to JPEGs anyway, which is not the case with Epub.
In theory, small GIFs - less than 127KB in size - will be preserved by Kindlegen as GIF, assuming your Jutoh configuration settings also preserve GIF output. However, Adobe Digital Editions (and probably derived ereader firmware) has problems with some GIFs, so PNG can be better for Epub use. Also, we have heard from a Jutoh user whose transparent GIFs work fine in Kindle books when previewing, but not when the book is delivered by Amazon to the customer. If you need to compile both Epub and Kindle books and you must use GIF or PNG, you can use conditional formatting to include both formats in your project and include only the relevant ones in your book. Or, use GIFs, and test in ADE and other readers if possible to ensure they are displaying correctly.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0135: Some image properties are not working | Next: KB0137: How do I combine several projects into one project?