drop shadow with image characters

[slivingston]

I am using the Image Characters personalization layer in Expressions. The customer would like a drop shadow behind their blocks of letters. I do not see where it is possible with image characters. Am I missing something? I have attached two images, one shows what I am getting and the other show what the customer wants.

 

Shawn

ABC_Postcard_FRONT-Original.pdf

ABC_Postcard_FRONT-Missing Shadow.pdf

[Dan Korn]

Sorry, but Expression does not have the ability to put drop shadows on image characters. You can put drop shadows on masking text personalizations only.

 

Frankly, from what I have seen, image characters are not usually full blocks of text like that; a more typical usage is like in the Image Characters tutorial, where the images have transparency. In such a case, you could add the drop shadow to each image character image manually.

 

One thing you could try with your "full block" image characters is to have a second image character personalization underneath the main one, which uses the same data, but whose image character set consists of only empty blocks with the shadow applied for all characters. I think that would give you the effect you want.

[slivingston]

I tried your suggestion of adding another personalization that is a shadow image character. My problem now is that Expressions is not seeing the transparency of the shadow. It is saved as a layered TIFF as it says to do in the User Guide. I have attached another image to show what I am getting. Thank you for your help.

With Shadows.pdf

[slivingston]

I got the shadow to show correctly. Was not using an Alpha Channel. However, the scaling of the type and the shadow are not working together well because the shadow is slightly larger than the type blocks. Thanks for the suggestion, it was worth a try.