Fuzzy Shadow on Text Oddity

[Visio Guy]

I've figured out some of the weirdness that applies when adding the newer Effects to groups vs. subshapes.

Read about it here:
Fuzzy Shadow on Text Oddity

[Yacine]

The same applies to the 3D effects.

[David.P]

Hi guys,

a very interesting and important topic for me.

Have you already found a way how to convert from Visio to PDF and keep the transparencies of these fuzzy shadow effects (without conversion to bitmap graphics)?

I have two arrows in Visio, where the top one has a glow shadow applied to it:

(I'd actually like to have the glow without blur, but so far have not found a way to do that)


If this is printed or converted to PDF from Visio, the resulting PDF looks like this (i.e. the arrow with the glow applied to it is converted to an ugly bitmap):


Thanks for any ideas how to retain both transparency and vector property of things!

-
Edit: not sure if this has to do with it, but I'll add the link anyway for completeness:
Transparency in PDF files

[wapperdude]

Hi David,
So far, the only thing I've found that produces a satisfactory result is to eliminate the glow.  The approach is to make a line stub with the desired arrowhead style, increase the linewidth as desired.  Then, underlay the stub so that the arrowheads align.  Group if desried.  Note, initially, keeping the line color something like yellow helps visually with the alignment process.  (You can also change the cap type to flat.)  Export to PDF.  Somewhat inconvenient work-around.   Benefit:  the "glow" is no longer fuzzy.  Have not discovered a non-fuzzy glow.

Exporting to SVG, EMF and re-importing to Visio look OK within Visio, but look bad when subsequently saved as PDF

[David.P]

Yes, thank you very much Wapperdude. Too bad that there is no Glow effect without Blur. I would really like to use this effect to make lines and arrowheads stand out better from the background when crossing over other lines.

The solution with underlaying and grouping is of course possible, but unfortunately too inconvenient, because the arrows are used a hundred times and changed and moved around a thousand times when editing my drawings.

I shall keep experimenting.

Cheers
David

[wapperdude]

David...
It just occurred to me, how about a custom line pattern?  Ought to be able to make a pattern that has a dark solid core with white outer edges.  Perhaps a little less inconvenient, eh?       

[David.P]

Yeah Wapperdude sounds good -- but that pattern would not apply to the arrowhead, would it?

[wapperdude]

Correct.  You would also need a custom line end.

[David.P]

Thanks, that's what I thought. I have already experimented with that a few times. However, I'd like to use the same arrows (with white borders around them) in PowerPoint, and in PowerPoint there's no way to create custom line patterns and ends like in Visio.

Only that 'Glow' function could be used the same way in PowerPoint and in Visio.

I think I'll live with the pixelation of the arrows for now.

[Yacine]

@David, you might want to have a look at this topic: http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=8062.0

[David.P]

Hello Yacine,

Thank you so much for pointing that out. This actually works pretty well. I made a little variation out of it, see attachment.



If only we could define our custom line end and line pattern in such a way that their size could be easily changed from the regular "Line" menu.

I wonder if this is possible?

[Yacine]

You could cheat by creating a number of different line styles and line ends, then link the line weight to those styles.

... GUARD(USE("AnnotationLine"&INT(LineWeight*4/1 pt)))

Not really a solution.

[David.P]

I think I had created custom line patterns before, whose width could be changed normally using the line menus. I just don't remember exactly how I did that

[Yacine]

Check my attachment.

[David.P]

Yeah, but that worked for me at that time without having to create different line thicknesses, only with one line thickness.

I'll have a look how I did it back then and report.