"Glow" with text

I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm stumped. What I'm trying to do is write my son's name in his favorite colors using an orange fill and blue outline. The effect I'm striving for is a nice orange middle with a smooth transition to the blue edge. I've tried using the inner and outer contour tools, but to no avail. The top image below has an inner contour and the general look I want, except the fill is gray instead of orange. The bottom image has on outer contour and there is no smooth transition. Both outlines have a width of .25 and 10-step, 3-pixel contours.

Can y'all help me out? Much obliged.

.joroho.

Joel

Here are three ways to do it, the first example below uses the Glow Shadow (funny how obvious that was, eh) applied to the orange text. Then violet was dragged and dropped onto the glow shadow to make it violet.

In the second example, I created a duplicate of the orange text, made it violet, converted it to a TrueColor bitmap, copied and pasted in into SL-Blur (Free in the Shareware page) added a 15 blur, with Add Border checked, then copied and pasted it back into Xara and dropped it under the orange text.

The third example uses the Contour you're not having any luck with. Copy the orange text to the clipboard. Change the color of the text to medium violet, then apply your Contour to outside. Drag while onto the contour to make it fade to white. Paste the orange text on top (Shift Ctrl V)

This what you wanted to do?

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Even So Humble...

[This message was edited by Gary W. Priester on April 28, 2001 at 11:04 AM.]

Hi Joho,

See my image below for instructions... Hope it helps.

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Big Frank was
http://www.wognum.org/files/madewithxarax.gif

[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

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Big Frank was
http://www.wognum.org/files/madewithxarax.gif

Frank, You've hit the nail on the head. Thanks so much. I played with the fill settings a little and came up with this.

.joroho.

1. type your text, set its size etc and make it blue.
2. Clone it.
3. Make the clone orange.
4. Slider the feathering slider to get desired fade.
5. Done! See image below (if i can get image uploading to work (its my 1st time)).

bit big that - still it worked as expected - must watch the size next time. Fun here isn't it!

Johoro
As an alternative way of including both colours I've used 3 shapes.
1: Make the text.
2: Copy to clipboard.
3: Give the text a blue colour and a 20 stroke internal contour.
4: Ctrl-Shift-V the text from the clipboard. Give it an external contour, 1 step.
5: Convert to shapes and ungroup. delete the inner contour.
6: Draw a rectangle bounding this text and send to back.
7: Select rectangle and text contour created in step 5.
8: Arrange / combine shapes / slice. Delete.
9: Fill colour Orange
10: Give this shape an internal 20 step contour.
11: Apply a fractal plasma fill.
12: Create a simlar sized rectangle and send to back, give it an off orange fill and a bevel.
I also messed around with the attribute profile to get a shape that I liked.
Egg

This is just to see the 2 shapes used