[XeTeX] Could Adobe Photoshop's "blending options" for text be supported in a future {Pdf|Xe}TeX variant

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi all,

about a week ago I mentioned my article in Czech mentioning the rendering
modes. I showed how to do it via \special and \pdfliteral. Embossing may be
acheved by storing the text in an \hbox and \copy'ing it several times at
slightly shifted positions with different colours and redering modes. Petr
Olšák wrote another article (in Czech) about primitive graphics again via
\pdfliteral and \special. You can do quite a lot using these tricks and TeX
macros. Of course, I would not use it for complex graphics but simple
effects are easy to achieve and no further support in pdftex and xdvipdfmx
is needed.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz

2018-04-05 2:25 GMT+02:00 Ross Moore <ross.moore at mq.edu.au>:

> Hi again Phil,
>
> On Apr 5, 2018, at 8:39 AM, Ross Moore <ross.moore at mq.edu.au> wrote:
>
>
>
>    - https://www.dropbox.com/s/b7a1383rb1dx2vp/Ao%20dais.pdf?dl=0
>    - https://www.dropbox.com/s/7s6s7n9w8popiyg/MENU%20001%
>    20new%20ellipse.pdf?dl=0
>    - https://www.dropbox.com/s/smmcjy9zuuxa1nu/MENU%20001%20%
>    28metallic%20gold%20text%20demo%29.pdf?dl=0
>    <https://www.dropbox.com/s/smmcjy9zuuxa1nu/MENU%20001%20%28metallic%20gold%20text%20demo%29.pdf?dl=0>
>
> I would be interested in others' reactions to this.
>
>
> These are using PDF’s concept of “Text Rendering” modes.
> In particular  7 Tr   meaning mode 7,
> which uses the outlines of characters to be the clipping path for an
> underlying graphic.
>
>
> I was able to extract the “underlying graphics” from the 1st of your PDFs.
> Here is the one for the 2nd line of text.
>
>
> You can see the need to have a clipping path, created from the text using
> the same font that was “blended” to make this image.
> The need for exact positioning can also be appreciated from the image.
>
>
> Below is the image for the gold text in the 3rd PDF.
> Again the need for clipping is apparent.
>
>
>
> Thus the letter shapes restrict what parts of the graphic come shining
> through.
>
> This is essentially already available with pdfTeX; viz.
>
>    https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/250156/problem-
> with-pdfliteral/250162#250162
>
>
> There is one part missing:  how to make the underlying graphic correctly?
> e.g., to have letters looking like they are embossed, or standing out in
> 3D, etc.
>
> You need to construct the desired view in an image, and then place the
> actual characters,
> with appropriate rendering mode, exactly over that image so that only the
> desired parts are shown.
> This requires external image-processing software, which is what you paid
> Adobe to do with Photoshop.
>
>
>
> Philip Taylor
>
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Ross
>
>
> * Dr Ross Moore*
>
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> Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
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>
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