Flash IDE Text Strokes
I’m currently working on a project where the designer LOVES to use stroked text. As you probably know by now, there is no text stroking in Flash unless you bring the asset in already stroked from another program or you break the text apart and add a stroke to the broken up shapes. There is, however, a little trick you can do to keep your text editable and add a stroke in Flash.
Let’s create some static text on our stage. Now we will open up the Filters panel, make sure our text is selected, and add a Glow filter. Set the strength to 500% and color to whatever you’d like. As for the blur x and y, this works best when you keep the values of this relatively low. The higher you go obviously the more blur will be added to your stroke edges. You can try to put the strength higher, like 1000% and put a blur of 10 if you’re feeling crazy, but i’d recommend staying down with the blur to achieve the best effect.
It’s important to note that some fonts don’t look as good as others, but for a lot of fonts that I’ve tested it works out pretty well. I wouldn’t go with anything lower than a blur of 2 either as the sharpness of a 1 makes the edges of the font look bad. Hopefully this saves some of you some time like it did for me while working on this project.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
I use this trick all the time to create this effect, except usually with AS. As you stated, if you do it right it can be quite convincing.
My unsolicited example here.
Very smart, wish I’d had this little trick on a number of past projects.
For some reason I never even noticed you could go beyond 100% . thanks for pointing this out:)
It took me a while to realize I could do it too initially
Also, if you want even more powerful strokes but don’t want to go to a very high value (because lets face it, sometimes when you go high they look ugly), you can just stack them on top of each other and add more glow filters to one object and set those values. that also helps achieve some things that can’t be achieved with just one.
i’m curious as to the memory this will take? since it is a filter..
John,
I’m sure like with all filters if you start applying a bunch of them it will affect performance greatly. I can’t say I’ve ever done any performance testing on it but I have used it in projects without crippling the application to a halt so i guess it all depends.