[Mooff]

first one. Won't have time to debug that until next week. However, please give more information (what characters are the issues, what they are in your original posts -quote that part- and what they are in the caption, another quote).

second one. Sure, will be included in the next version - i used parts of the sprite code Osbes wrote for our css-sprite performance addon. There we do need transparency, so the images are saved as *.png
For the nivo slider *.jpg does make more sence and jpegs are alot smaller.

This part

                            $img_filepath = $slider_img_filepath . 'slide_' . $i . '.png';
                            $success = imagepng($sprite, DIR  . ($slider_img_filepath[0] != DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR ?  DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR : '') . $img_filepath);

will be changed into this one (already implemented our version)

                            $img_filepath = $slider_img_filepath . 'slide_' . $i . '.jpg';
                            $success = imagejpeg($sprite, DIR  . ($slider_img_filepath[0] != DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR ?  DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR : '') . $img_filepath);