On 2018-04-04 at 19:38:44 +0100, Philip Taylor (RHUoL) wrote: > I have been playing with Adobe Photoshop's "blending options" for > text recently, adding a gold or metallic texture to otherwise plain > text. The results are visually very striking, and I therefore > began to wonder whether similar functionality might one day be > added to Pdf/XeTeX, in the former case natively and in the latter > case via \specials and an extended (x)dvipdfm(x) driver. > > Three examples of the sorts of effect I have in mind can be seen at > : > [omitted]
Sorry Phil, this can't and shouldn't be done by TeX engines. The only reasonable way to achieve such effects is: * convert each glyph to a standalone vector graphic (PostScript, SVG, or similar) * process each vector graphic with external tools and export the results to PostScript * create a new Type 3 font with the original, maybe adjusted, metrics Type 3 fonts can contain arbitrary PostScript code (scalable, with colours and shading) and are supported by all PDF-creating engines and dvips already. The best tool for vector graphic processing I'm aware of is Inkscape. I have absolutey no experience with Inkscape and don't know whether it has a scripting language built-in. The latter is required in order to process a complete font without manual interaction. I suggest to move this discussion to texhax because there is no way to add such a feature to TeX engines and because I'm convinced that you get more feedback there. Looking forward to meet you at BachoTeX, Reinhard -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotu...@web.de ------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex