[XeTeX] Transparent Fonts

[William Adams]

On Oct 12, 2008, at 5:45 PM, Arthur Butler wrote:

> Thanks for all the great work on XeTeX. I'm trying to use fonts  
> which are just dark around the edges of the letters (such as  
> Forgotten Futurist Shadow, KacstTitleL Gyneric 3D BRK, Lucid Type B  
> Outline BRK, Unanimous BRK)  often called outline in their names.  
> I'm trying to make them opaque colours inside the outline, so they  
> show clearly over an image for a title page. Any ideas? Or are there  
> fonts with coloured insides which I should use?
>
> I've tried googling, found info about tikz package and perhaps  
> setting extra font features, or lower level pdf commands, but  
> haven't got these to work.
>
> Thanks in advance,


Unfortunately, it's only PostScript Type 3 fonts which can directly  
have multiple colours.

For Type 1 and TrueType and OpenType, it's only b/w / on/off.

This is worked around by using multiple glyphs per character w/ each  
glyph assigned a different colour. Commercial fonts which use this  
technique include Rosewood from Adobe's Wood Type series or David  
Lemon's Copal.

On the bright side, in (La)TeX, once one writes a macro to handle the  
glyph formatting it's easy and automatic to use.

If your font doesn't support that sort of thing you'll need to convert  
the type to paths and manually set the desired fill colours.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications