Is there a trick to text stroke I am missing?

[notyou87]

Hi all.

I rarely use it but when I use stroke on text it's as if you need the font size to be HUGE for it to look ok/good, otherwise just setting a stroke size to 1px, it will overwhelm and be thicket than the rest of the text - regardless of font, it seems.
Is there a trick to using it? I know that switching to "smooth" helps a tiny bit, but again, that's usually with much larger font sizes.

I can't be the only one to think this? Often I need to select the text layer with the wand using a feather and expand XX pixels, make a new layer and flood fill and place it below. Or I try achieve it with layer effects. But both of these "workarounds" defeats the purpose of having the feature for a stroke on text. Maybe there is a simple setting I need to check or uncheck so it works/looks much better.

Thanks in advance

[hartpaul]

Information needed -
1. What version of PSO and updates? do Help > About
2. What size text are you using , what font, give details or a cropped screenshot showing the relevant settings.
If your text is too small then the stroke will cause problems.
A font size of 48 pixels , Arial and stroke width 1 to 3 works well but 4 starts to look grotty. Practise with Arial first before you try any other fonts to get the feel of how the stroke works.
Its application is faster in PSP than Photoshop where you have to do separate operations whereas in PSP you get the fill and stroke at the same time.

Type a couple of wordsof text and then do Control A to select all that text and you can change the stroke , size and font and see the effect in real time.

[notyou87]

Information needed -
1. What version of PSO and updates? do Help > About
2. What size text are you using , what font, give details or a cropped screenshot showing the relevant settings.
If your text is too small then the stroke will cause problems.
A font size of 48 pixels , Arial and stroke width 1 to 3 works well but 4 starts to look grotty. Practise with Arial first before you try any other fonts to get the feel of how the stroke works.
Its application is faster in PSP than Photoshop where you have to do separate operations whereas in PSP you get the fill and stroke at the same time.

Type a couple of wordsof text and then do Control A to select all that text and you can change the stroke , size and font and see the effect in real time.

1. 20.2.0.1 x64
2. I don't typically work with large canvases because that is not what I am in need of - I work with (for example) smaller ones such as 250x80px (W x H). Arial text is "ok" and perfectly fine with 1 or 2 pixel strokes with size 48 px font and even "ok" with size 18 with 1 px stroke. As soon as you start working below that, it is very bad. The stroke seems to get placed on the "inside" rather than the outside so it fills the letters instead of being adding outside - if that makes sense. Probably doesn't but I am unsure how to explain it.
I love working with many fonts, not just Arial so would love if I was doing something wrong and can make the stroke better for smaller fonts.

[jjangfree]

PSP text stroke is middle only. there is no outside or inside stroke.
You need 2 text layer for outlining small font like 04b08 font etc.. one is for text , the other is for outline.

[hartpaul]

I did a bit of testing here and the application of points / pixel is different in Photoshop and PSP as is also the comparison of Stroke in Photoshop and the Stroke in PSP.
I first did some lines of text in Photoshop with a stroke width of 1 pixel and text at 6, 9, and 12 points.

I then repeated it with PSP X9 with a stroke of 1 pixel and again 6, 9 and 12 points - this is the top left.
I then used a conversion chart to get the corresponding pixel sizes of 8, 12, and 16 pixels - this is bottom left and the 1 pixel stroke hides the color of the text.
I then chose the point size and switched to pixels and used that - 25, 38 and 50 pixels - this top right and as can be seen the sizes are pretty close. So PSP uses a different conversion factor of points to pixels - shown bottom right.

I then used a pixel size of 30 and typed in the characters AIL[{ and used a hard brush with different pixel sizes to measure the dimensions. The 30 pixels gives the letter A a width of 17 pixels, L base is 13 pixels, width of vertical line in L is 2 pixels (so we are adding a 1 pixel stroke to both sides of that to get a total width of the vertical stroke of 5 pixels. In PSP the color ios not even black but shades of grey.

I then cropped the (I) out of the 12 point GEORGIA in the Photoshop and PSP examples scaled them up to about the same size (required different scalings) to compare the stroke around the letters in both Photoshop and PSP. As can be seen shades of grey in PSP but black in Photoshop.

So perhaps a better application of the stroke needs to be added to the wish list for PSP 2019 .

[Jean-Luc]

I first did some lines of text in Photoshop with a stroke width of 1 pixel and text at 6, 9, and 12 points.
I then repeated it with PSP X9 with a stroke of 1 pixel and again 6, 9 and 12 points - this is the top left.

When working with points on different images, each image needs to have same PPI value (-> Image -> Image informations").
When placing same text (in points) inside images with different PPI, text size will change.

[ehume]

I don't know if it is a helpful workaround, but Inkscape is a free vector-based graphics program. It has a flexible stroke/fill function that works on text and may be helpful. I used to use this app when I was making icons, which I would then port to PSP7 for finishing; didn't use text a lot but tried Arial recently. Results seem good.