Stewy <> wrote:
>In article <>,
> Terry Pinnell <> wrote:
>
>> Can anyone point me to a download source for a Windows font which I
>> can use for slide show captions please? Ideally I want two fonts:
>> white with a black border, and black with a white border - the sort of
>> thing you see on film subtitles. Mostly I can manage with a familiar
>> 'solid' font like Arial, Times or Verdana, in white or black. But a
>> font with a contrasting 'border' would be more satisfactory.
>>
>> Presumably I'm looking for a .TTF file, which I just place in the
>> Windows\Font folder - with the other 484 entries I see there already!
>
>I'm assuming by slideshow you mean something like Powerpoint?
>
>'Hollow' fonts tend to have a transparent 'inside' as these are really
>vector graphics.
>
>There are two ways to do what you require.
>
>Use the 'cleartype' fonts - Verdana, Trebuchet, Tahoma or Georgia.
>
>Make the caption a colour different to the background - yellow works
>well. Vary the colour according to what the main colour of the photo is.
>
>The other way is to use Photoshop. Type and position your caption using
>either black or white. Using the Magic Wand click on the type - make
>sure to uncheck the contiguous box. Select - Modify - Expand choose the
>number of pixels. Rasterize the type, then use the Paint Bucket tool to
>fill in this Expanded selection with an opposite colour. You could use
>hollow fonts too and use Select Modify - Contract, I guess - I've never
>tried this but I assume it would work.
Thanks all.
It looks like my quest for a black & white font is over-ambitious
then! I hadn't realised that the 'open' types were transparent.
I'm not too keen on yellow, or changing colours to suit the
background. Apart from the extra work involved, the loss of
consistency could spoil an otherwise professional looking movie. I
suppose about 95% of my captions so far have been white, but
occasionally I can't find an area of the image dark enough to allow
that choice, and resort to black.
Similarly, it's a pain to have to make a new JPG with the caption
specially designed in the way you describe (in PaintShop Pro in my
case), and I then lose the flexibility of moving the caption around
and/or splitting it into 2 or 3 lines within MoT itself. The 'safe TV
image area' adds a complication to this, and positioning the text in
advance in PaintShop Pro would be tricky.
BTW, the program is MemoriesOnTV, using JPG photos with MP3.
soundtrack.)
It's a pity MoT doesn't allow captions to be inside a rectangle (as
you can do in say IrfanView), as that would also solve the problem. I
think that's the way most film subtitles are handled?
--
Terry, West Sussex, UK
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