On my Blog page, for the moment and until the Skitchin’ post falls off, you’ll see an example of another iWeb problem I had to work around. I create (mostly) original artwork for my site using Keynote and sometimes other tools. Then, I convert it to a PDF and place it in iWeb. When Publishing, iWeb would use it’s image conversion abilities to convert the high resolution vector PDF to a perfectly sized PNG (if the PDF includes transparency, which most of mine do).

Since the upgrade, this still works as I’d expect on all the pages EXCEPT for the Blog page. That page’s thumbnail images are obtained from whatever I place in the media placeholder above. If I place a PDF there (which is what I used to do), the image that gets created for the Blog page gets it’s transparent background turned to white! I had almost begun to accept this as one of those things I just can’t change when I decided to try dropping in a PNG image instead. That’s when I found that when if you feed it a PNG with an alpha channel (transparency for the non-alpha initiated), then it gets converted properly.

Is there a downside? Maybe. My domain2.sites file holds all the base images (before conversion) for my site. Since vector based PDF images are almost always smaller than the same sized bitmapped images, this may mean my domain file could end up being larger than it would have been otherwise. However, since these files are small relative to, say, photos, it might not be a huge detriment. Also, there may be a slight difference since iWeb is rescaling a bitmap instead of rendering a vector, but the extra softness on the edges might not be noticeable by many (of course I notice it, but I’m just going to ignore it. Watch me. I’m good at it!).