Printing transparent images

[noise]

I'm running against a brick wall. I'm writing some HTML, in which I
have a base image, and an overlay image, which I want to be 25%
opaque. I only need be concerned about IE5.5 / 6 at this point.

I can render this quite nicely on screen several ways-- using PNGs,
GIFs, AlphaImageLoader filters, Alpha filters, IMG, SPAN, etc.
Beautiful.

The ugly part is when it gets to paper. I cannot get the overlay
image to render anything but completely opaque. No matter what I do,
it blots out the base image. It even shows up correctly in the "Print
Preview" screen.

Can anyone give me a few tips? Has anyone tried this? Is it a
problem on my end (bad printer!), or a problem with IE (recognized by
MSFT or otherwise)?

Thanks for any advice!

Paul
object88 at yahoo dot com

 

[noise]

A little extra info. I can switch rendering techniques between
printing and on-screen-viewing, so if anyone has a method that will
render semi-opaque image to paper but not work on screen, I'd like to
hear that too.

I'm also open to any other graphics formats, as I'm creating the
Bitmap on the server, on the fly, and it's a 1x1 graphic (stretched to
size on the browser), so size doesn't matter as much.

Thanks again!