Options making Neon Light effect possible to TextOut

[Bugala]

I was trying to make something resembling of Neon Lights effect to TextOut, but unfortunately wasnt able to.

Basically I figured there were two things missing, which I am now wishlisting for future Hollywood versions (nothing critical these, just something if you like to add some more options, could add these, but not really anything critical)

1. I first thought I would be able to do it with Border option. However, Border option worked wrong way around.

For basically to make something look like neon light, simplest way is to first draw a line with white, and then draw borders around it with some color. This way it looks like the white part is the brightest part of that light, and borders define the color of that light, making us think it is for example pink light in middle, when it is actually white.

Basically, using very small font size, you can make it look like a neon light using the border system, but when fonts size is bigger, it doesnt work anymore.

problem is that Border always ADDS to the size of the font.

First option that I am hoping is an option to make BORDER be possible to work in such way that instead of ADDing to the size of the font, it would just occupy the chosen amount of the text.

As example, suppose I have text like this:

Code: Select all

 -
---
 -
  

When using BORDER, it normally does like this:

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  B
 B-B
B---B
 B-B
  B

But What I would need it to do is:

Code: Select all

 
 B
B-B
 B

Now the number obviously choosing how many pixels Border would occupy.

This way I could have Font size 30, and choose to for example use 27 of that size for the BORDER, and leave only 3 for the actual color, and this way it would basically be possible to somewhat emulate Neon Light.

2. However, the example above wouldnt look very good in reality, since it is just two colors in reality, and with that big size, it would clearly already show it is not a Neon Light.

Therefore the next wish, which would actually make it look like a Neon light, would be the possibility of making it Gradient colored.

With Gradient color I believe you could get somewhat decent looking Neon Light effect to the TextOut.

Even better if you could have both INSIDE BORDER and OUTSIDE BORDER in same TextOut and use Gradient coloring for both of them, making it possible to use INSIDE BORDER to make it like seeming the actual Light bulb of the Neon Light, and then OUTSIDE (the current) BORDER to make it seem like some light glow still coming from it.


Anyway, this is obviously nothing critical, and this the first time I would have needed it, so if you have extra time, could add this in future, but not sure how much use it would actually be.

[Flinx]

Hello Bugala,
I had also been looking for ways to illustrate text. Here is one of my experiments from there. It's not very usable, because it takes a long time to calculate a large border (that's why I did chose Step -2). But you can see from it that it might be useful to have not only a color gradient, but also a transparency gradient.

Code: Select all

SetFillStyle(#FILLCOLOR)
Box(0, 0, 300, 200, $333333, {Rotate = 25})

SetFont(#SANS, 80)
SetFontColor($ff55ff)
size=25
tp=242
For i=size To 1 Step -2
	SetFontStyle(#BORDER, {BorderColor= ARGB(tp, $ee55ee), BorderSize=i})
	TextOut(100, 100, "Neon Lights")
Next
WaitLeftMouse()

[Bugala]

Thanks for sharing. Could work on something. For keep in mind that you can make a brush out of the final product, and then just use displaybrush to keep displaying it each cycle.

[Juan Carlos]

Also can help some font with neon style for this, instead of a normal font?

[Bugala]

@Juan Carlos

True, a good tip, I forgot those exist.