How fill outline font with different color?

[Gilfner]

I'm programming text boxes of varying colors, and I'd like the text inside to
contrast for readability regardless of the color of the text box.

My strategy is to use a simple outline font, thinking I can set its outside
color to be white and its inside color to be black, giving it inherent
readability contrast with any color - a simple solution, often used.

But it doesn't work that way in my Pub2003. The center of my font displays
transparent, rendering my strategy useless. (See my example at
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/chipmunk/pubexample.gif)

Can someone suggest a solution or workaround?

Thank you,
Craig Wilson, Fairfield (near the Bay Area), CA
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Mary Sauer]

About the only way to get this look is WordArt.

Or create your text. Format, Font, check the outline effect. Right-click the
text box, save as picture, use the .wmf format. Insert the picture, ungroup,
fill with your background color, change the outline to white.

 

[Ed Bennett]

I'm programming text boxes of varying colors, and I'd like the text inside to
contrast for readability regardless of the color of the text box.

My strategy is to use a simple outline font, thinking I can set its outside
color to be white and its inside color to be black, giving it inherent
readability contrast with any color - a simple solution, often used.

A font just creates inked areas and uninked areas. Outline fonts work
the same way - there is no mechanism anywhere to define the "inside" to
be a different colour.

If on the other hand you use a solid font, then you can workaround this
issue. Create two copies of the text box, one setting the "Outline"
option in the Font dialog (TextRange.Font.Outline in code), and one
keeping it solid. Then the outline box mimics an outline font, and can
be set to one colour, and the solid box is obviously solid, and can be
set to a different colour. Since they use the same basic font, they
match up with each other. Unfortunately this does not allow you to set
the outline thickness. If you need more flexibility, you should use
WordArt as Mary suggests.

 

[Gilfner]

Mary, I tried Ed's suggestion, but the outlines aren't thick enough to my
satisfaction. I haven't tried your wordart suggestion yet, because I'm using
this as a database output, with 240 little boxes per page (see a mockup page
at http://pages.sbcglobal.net/chipmunk/pubex2.gif), and I don't think wordart
would be practical. (Maybe I'm wrong?)

I also looked at modifying a font to get a thicker line, but I realized that
no matter the thickness of the font (even outline), publisher will only
display one color: black, or white, or whatever.

So I'm thinking I could stick little tiny *pictures*, a little colored box,
one box per letter, slap it in there with publisher, if that would be easier
to program in publisher. (Each letter is specific to its color.) (I haven't
programmed publisher before, but I'm a good learner.)

This is all to create custom laser labels; small, though, 80 to a page, that
I'm going to stick on book spines. If I were a VB programmer, I'd do it with
that. But I'm more comfortable with publisher.

Any thoughts on the best way to approach this from either of you two? I'm
only interested in doing a sheet at a time (about 80 labels), then applying
them. Then another day I'd do another 80. This is a project for a year or two.

Thanks.