Creating Transparent Text

Hi everyone,

 

Here's a new one for me...

 

I have a customer who wants to use a dark brown background and have the variable text that sits on it set to 90% or 95% opacity. Can this even be done in FP?

I'm guessing that the text is variable and not static, right?

I'm guessing that the text is variable and not static, right?

 

 

You guessed correctly!

You guessed correctly!

I hate when I do that! http://www.domaschuk.com/smilies/headbash.gif

 

 

Transparency for text isn't available and it's "unofficially" available for images (there's another thread here about how to do that).

This is actually easier then it sounds using images, but you'll have to give up kerning options on a font. If you can get away with a fixed width you'll be ok.

I can definitely get away with a fixed width on the images. I'm going to see if I can locate the thread on images now.

Lisa- Here's an idea I haven't tried yet, but I just thought of:

Place the text you want to be transparent outside of the print area of the PDF. Next up, add a drop shadow to this text and apply a VERY large distance to it to place the shadow where you want the transparent text. Set the spread to 0%. This is working for me on the computer screen, but I'm not sure how this will RIP. A word of warning, drop shadows have taken a very long time for me to RIP in the past, but for a small project this may work.

If the background is a solid dark brown background, you could create the effect you want in another application, see what the resulting color is and set your text to that color. In photoshop, you can use the info palette to determine the color. In Illustrator, InDesign, or Quark, you will probably have to export to PDF and use Output Preview in Acrobat Pro.

 

Of course, if your dark brown background is an image or pattern, this would not work.