Idea for outlined fonts - thoughts please

[evilc]

Having worked with rlToday, and currently coding an app to do something similar, I have wanted a couple of times to display text with an outline (ie white text with black outline so it is visible on any background) but simply printing a black version of the text in a bigger font underneath white text in a smaller fontsize does not work because of the way fonts are scaled.

However, this got me thinking...

What if one were to design a set of custom fonts for this purpose?

The way I am thinking, you would need two fonts - an "inner" version and an "outer" version. The outer version would have to be scaled about the centre of the letter, not about the baseline, and I would imagine that the spacing on the inner font would need to be as wide as the characters on the outer font.

So, before I waste loads of time getting font editors and seeing if it can be done, I would like to ask if anyone knows if this would be feasible, or if they have successfully done it or failed.

Another idea I suppose would be to print the outer font 4 times (left one, right one, up one, down one) - I guess this would have the same effect but at the cost of speed.

In an ideal world, it would be nice to not have to make an inner font - just to have to make an outer version of existing fonts, but I am not sure this would work unless you could set the spacing of the stock inner font wider.

Comments, suggestions please.

[tene]

The classic path approach isn't working on WM?

[Synned]

Ultimatelaunch does it...I have two colored text and it looks pretty sweet. The font is called 'juice' not sure if that has anything to do with it though

[evilc]

What is this "Classic path" method you speak of?

At a guess I think you mean drawing a line around the font programatically?
This is not an option for some things, unless you have access to the source code - it would be nice to have a solution that could be implimented without needing to code for it in the app. For example, rlToday would benefit nicely from just such a system.

[evilc]

OK, so it has been done before then, although I did search around the net before I posted, honest!

It seems that the term used for the "inner" font is a "fill" font. I am going to try and find a freeware fill + outline font combo, pls let me know if you are aware of any.

[evilc]

Ultimatelaunch does it...I have two colored text and it looks pretty sweet. The font is called 'juice' not sure if that has anything to do with it though

When you say "Ultimatelaunch" does it - what do you mean? I bought UL and I do not see the font on my system or in the UL dir.

I see a "juice" font on the internet that is a fill+outline set, but it is not free.

So if it is possible, I may well have a bash at doing a free one myself. At the very least it would be worth doing just the numbers for SMS / email counts in rlToday

[evilc]

An update here:
My main use for something like this was to be with applications such as rlToday.
However, stefanux is now writing XIAMultiTheme (http://www.xiaprojects.com/?section=All&project=XIAMultiTheme) (XMT) which is compatible with, and extends rlToday. One of the things XMT does is allow you to specify a directory as a font, and it will look for image files named accordingly
ie if you wanted to print "123" you would need "1.png", "2.png" and "3.png" in the directory you specify.

I have made a 16px high font of numbers in transparent PNG (Great for overlaying message counts onto icons) and added it to the XMT project for now.
If the need is still there in a while I will look at making a fill font combo and releasing it, maybe as part of the XMT project, but for now this is a good enough solution for me.

[evilc]

dupe post deleted