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Does the Drop Shadow Feature actually work?


ReminderVDP

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I'm trying to see if the drop shadow feature actually works on a text frame for white type. I keep getting the drop shadow around the inline image and not on the text in the text frame.

 

I made sure I had the drop shadow box checked on the Composition settings and composed one record and there are no drop shadows. I've never been able to get this to work before so if anyone is using it properly, please let me know if I'm missing a setting or a check box somewhere.

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Well, yes, of course drop shadows do work, but perhaps not exactly the way you expect. If you go into, say, the Frodo Travel or Cell Phone tutorial, and apply drop shadow to one of the frames with a white background in the middle of the first page, you will see that it does indeed work.

 

The issue is whether/how drop shadow works with white text.

 

The idea behind a drop shadow is that it's a just that: a shadow, whose darkness is based on the darkness of the text it's shadowing. So black text will have a dark shadow, gray text will have a lighter shadow, and so on. When you get to the other extreme of white text, that has zero darkness, and therefore, like a flame made entirely of light, casts no shadow.

 

That's how the drop shadow feature was designed to work, and it does work that way. That said, we understand that people want to be able to see a drop shadow on white text, or perhaps more accurately, only see a shadow and not the main text at all. We do have this on our list of possible future enhancements.

 

Also, there are workarounds to achieve the effect you want. Searching for "fusionpro drop shadow white text" returns several hits on this very forum, including theis posts which I think shows you exactly how to do what you want:

http://forums.pti.com/showthread.php?p=652

(If I put on my forum moderator hat, I would suggest always doing such a search before posting a new question.)

 

You might also want to play around with the drop shadow options on the Graphics tab of the Composition Settings, as well as the options on the Text Effects dialog.

 

Finally, if you were to post your template, I'm sure that someone here would be able to take a look at it and figure out how to achieve what you want (if it's different than what that other forum post's suggestion yields).

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My experience with using the drop shadow on text is that it works as long as you are not using variable images. It makes an outline on the images then as well.

At the risk of further muddying the issue, I think what you're saying is really about inline graphics, flowing with text in a text frame, not about variable graphics in graphic frames. Having a text frame with drop shadow on top of a graphic is probably not a very commonly-used effect, but it does work, although you may need to change the drop shadow settings on the Composition Settings dialog to "soft mask" or "standard" instead of "use gray scale." But again, I don't think that's really relevant to what the original poster is asking about.

 

As for inline graphics specifically, how drop shadows are applied to them is tricky, and depends partially on whether the graphic actually has transparency versus simply white pixels. It's hard to make a specific suggestion about how to make a drop shadow work with an inline graphic in the abstract; having a file to work with is a lot easier.

Edited by Dan Korn
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Dan,

I changed the white text to black on our front cover image with the drop shadow at 100% and it still doesn't work in the preview or when it's composed. The black text on the inside front cover that is all black previews with the drop shadow but doesn't compose on the server with a drop shadow.

 

I did also do a search and looked through old posts and didn't find the info I needed.

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Dan,

I changed the white text to black on our front cover image with the drop shadow at 100% and it still doesn't work in the preview or when it's composed. The black text on the inside front cover that is all black previews with the drop shadow but doesn't compose on the server with a drop shadow.

 

I did also do a search and looked through old posts and didn't find the info I needed.

Okay, well, I've done all I can do with the information you've provided. If you post the template, I might be able to make a more specific suggestion.

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One more thing: There was an issue (case FP-12485) with drop shadows not being output properly under certain conditions in FusionPro 9.3. This was fixed in FusionPro 10.0. So it's possible that you're running into this bug, and that upgrading to FP 10 would resolve it. However, it's impossible for me to know for sure without your job files. If you don't want to post them here, you can send them to Support.
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