Shadows on OSD Text! :)

[pBS]

i'm surprised noone else thought of this, but i've been working on a backgroundless osd so i can see the video better behind, but when you use text of a certain color, it'll be invisible when over same color video so to remedy this most tv text overlay uses shadow or outline text...so..
i thought i'd try adding a duplicate text of darker color and slightly off-center underneath and viola! shadows on text... and it works great!
i can read a white font over white video easily
[plus i think it looks cooler too]
also a variant...since the overhead is pretty low for just plain text, you can put 4 'shadows' at opposite corners and simulate an 'outlined' text effect
here's an example of what i did..
Create a duplicate text style with shadow color..[not actually necessary,just easier]

Code:

<TextStyle name="OSDText" color="White" typeFace="Arial" size="13" style="bold"/>
<TextStyle name="OSDTextTitle" color="White" typeFace="Arial" size="17" style="bold"/>
<TextStyle name="OSDTextShadow" color="Black" typeFace="Arial" size="13" style="bold"/>
<TextStyle name="OSDTextTitleShadow" color="Black" typeFace="Arial" size="17" style="bold"/>

then duplicate and offset all your osd's in the file..[find a good offset and copy the locations around]

Code:

<DrawText text="@currentVideoTitle" loc="32,373" size="680,30" textStyle="OSDTextTitleShadow" align="Left" visible="true"/>
<DrawText text="@currentVideoTitle" loc="30,370" size="680,30" textStyle="OSDTextTitle" align="Left" visible="true"/>
<DrawText text="@description" loc="32,415" size="660,90" textStyle="OSDTextShadow" align="Left"/>
<DrawText text="@description" loc="30,412" size="660,90" textStyle="OSDText" align="Left"/>

don't forget to draw the shadow first!

[pBS]

oops,forgot to include the pic
Oh, and you can turn transparency down to make them even more visible than this..

[McBainUK]

Thats looks cool

[stefan]

Nice one =)

[Torque]

DrawTextWithOutline is also another way to do this. I'm hoping since Sub made the outline feature, he'll also implement some sort of 'DrawTextShadowed' style also.