how to add very thin glow shadow

[potion]

Hello,

I would like to add a thin glow shadow around my type. There doesn't appear to be any way to change the width of the glow shadow. It's possible to change the blur and the transparency, but not the width. Am I missing something?

Ultimately I will be exporting the image as a transparent gif. The type will be positioned over top of a background image on my website, and the background image has lots of different shades in it. So I want to add a white glow shadow around my type so my type will stand out a little better when the contrast with the background image is not as great. I don't want to export the type with the background image behind it because I may need to move the type relative to the background image. So I need the background image to be a separate file.

I'm finding that in Xara, even if I set the shadow blur to 0px, the glow shadow is still way too wide -- about twice the width of the letters in my text. I want an effect more like adding a thin white border around my text. However, when I try to add a line around the text by changing the line color of my font, it makes the font look too thin.

Thanks for any help,
Ryan

[potion]

Nevermind! I see I can change the width just be dragging the shadow.

[Odat]

If you click and drag over the glow shadow, you can change it's thickness. That might let you get it as skinny as you want it to be.

Failing that, you could possibly use the contour took. Add a 1 step outer contour to the text at the size that you want, make the contoured area white, then convert to editable shapes and ungroup. You can then add a feather to the contoured part to make it fuzzy like a glow shadow.

Or, you know, you figured out that first part yourself while I was typing this out...