How do you slice?

How do you guys take your designs and slice them into HTML? I currently use Fireworks to slice and then export it into Dreamweaver, however this leaves me with tons of nested tables... Please post your methods .

i dont really slice, i make my site up without the images, just bg colours then i cut the section out of my image and put it in.

I would never ever use a program to slice a image, cos programs are dumb

how do you "cut" it? i'm not sure what you mean...

I use the slice tool within photoshop.. then I just use the selection tool and copy the different slices (the selection "snap" to guides, edges slices and so on).. Before slices were in photoshop I used the "guide" tool (the blue lines)

uh.. I'm really watching a movie right now.. so.. bye.. hehe

Hmm, I'm sorta confused... . I use the slice tool on the area I want to slice, then I use the slice selection tool on it to select it, then Ctrl-C to copy? It won't let me copy tho...

I use ImageReady (comes w/ PhotoShop), but I only use the output HTML as a reference and generally tear down the tables and rebuild them from scratch (in code with Homesite). All of those graphic or WYSIWYG programs tend to encase the entire design in one table, which is slow to render. And they also usually force the table structure to a fixed width, which can be annoying to convert back to dynamic percentages if you're aiming for a fluid layout.

Look at your table structure from top to bottom and decide where you can logically split it into seperate tables. If you have a bunch of colspans, rowspans or nested tables, you can probably optimize quite a bit.

I use the rectangular selection tool.. I click at the top left corner, and drag it to the bottom right corner. It should automatically snap to the edges of the slice. Then I click edit -> copy as merged (I think that's what it says). Then I press ctrl + n (new document), press ok, and paste it.. Then you can save it as whatever you'd like to save it as..

You can probably make an action for automatically doing the above..

also if your using layers in photoshop and the layer your trying to copy has nothing in it, then it wont copy