Stroke Tints Change When Converted to Outlines
Here’s an interesting InDesign bug and workaround. We had an unnamed reader write in about a problem when converting text to outlines:
- Apply a color to some text and set it to 50% tint in the Swatches palette.
- Add a stroke to the text and apply the same color and tint to the stroke. (He explained that he used this technique to “thicken a font that doesn’t have a bold face.”)
- Now convert the text to outlines.
The stroke of the text changes to 100% instead of staying at the 50% tint. I would say that is likely a bug. However, there’s a relatively easy fix: Instead of applying the tint in the Tint field of the Swatches palette, create a new Tint Swatch and use that. (To make a tint swatch, choose the color you want to make a tint of, then choose New Tint Swatch from the Swatches palette flyout menu.) If you apply the tint swatch to the fill and stroke, the tint is maintained even after you convert to outlines.
Of course, in the name of font designers everywhere, I can’t really recommend stroking a font to thicken it up. I would never do that… unless no one was looking. Also, I am very wary of people converting text to outlines. Most people who do this really do not need to. If a printer told me to convert text to outlines in order to get a page to print, I would probably try to find a different output provider. In a future post we’ll talk about how to force text to output as outlines automatically in emergencies.
Interesting bug and great fix.
A related tip … if you’re stroking outlined text, select the outlined text object and 1) reduce the stroke width by half and 2) change the Align Stroke to Align to Outside (instead of the default Align Center).
This prevents half of the stroke width from gumming up the counters (the “holes” in the characters).
One reason for converting text to outlines is if you want to apply a gradient to it. It’s the devil’s own job to work with gradients on multi-line text.
In a job I did recently, I had some product names in a catalog — between one or two per page over 800 pages — that were designed to have gradient fills. They varied between one and two lines deep. Try that in normal type and it’s a fiasco.
My problem was that I needed to be able to convert the outlines back to type every time the client changed a product name, something they were still doing right up to my running the index. Oh, that was another reason I needed to get the outlines back to text.
So, I wrote a script that stored the text and any styling (these names as subscripts and superscripts and Greek symbols in character styles) with the outlines so a second script could convert back to type.
What a pain.
Just to be clear, Dave (and I know you know this): it is not difficult at all to apply a gradient fill to text: Just apply the gradient swatch, then — while the text is selected — drag over the text with the gradient tool in the direction you want the gradient to take.
However, I can see that this would be, um, less than ideal with 1600 headlines. So a script makes sense. Is there no way to change the local gradient angle and color for text in scripting?
Hi,
how can i convert my text into outline
b’coz in indesign cs2 i got dubble
text, one is converted and another one
is original text frame matter.
help me!
It is easy to apply a gradient to text, but getting it to apply a line at a time is the issue. It spreads itself out to cover some larger amount of the text frame in an ungainly way. Unless I’m missing something.
Oh, wait: the issue is that the design I was working with called for vertical gradients. That’s the problem. Horizontal gradients work fine with text but vertical ones are the pits.
Dave
Dave, you’re experiencing one of the great limitations of Gradient Swatches: That you cannot set their angle by definition. You can only set the angle in the Gradient palette, the Object Style definition (which obviously doesn’t help with text), or with the Gradient tool (by dragging over the selected text).
You can also set it by script .
But a vertically angled gradient applied to text just doesn’t behave the way any reasonable person would want it. That’s why I had to convert to outlines — I had no control over the design of the document in question; my job was to produce it.
Dave
Ah, I should have typed [evin grin] apparently.
Dave
Bhushan,
update your InDesign to the latest version (4.0.4) and you will have no problem with converting text. However you’ll still have a possibility to assign a shortcut also to “Create outlines without deleting text” (Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts; Product Area: Other)
You need to convert text to outlines for print if you submit the file as an eps or pdf, because when you open eps, and sometimes pdf, in Photoshop or another program in order to print, the system will need the original fonts if they are not converted. You could submit the fonts in the package to service provider but much simpler fix to convert to out lines.
Tina, why on earth would you be opening the file in Photoshop if the job is destined to print? That will rasterize the whole thing (convert it to a bitmapped image). Except in very rare cases, that would be a disaster.
Does anyone know if there’s a font similar to Geosanslight, but thicker? Or is there a way to thicken Geosanslight up? thanks
If we outline the text in table, we will have the outlined text + the original copy in CS2 or CS3. How can we just only get the outlined text?
Thanks
cy