Filling Outline Font With Colour

[Stace]

I'm using an outline font in Designer (the beta) to create text. I converted to curves to get it positioned how I want it.

How would you go about filling each shape with colour? Or is it too late now?

[v_kyr]

Well an outline font is already filled (the outline is the filled curve) and thus transparent inside. If you apply a stroke and fill color on a selected curve letter you can see it's behavior. Thus you might better use usual fonts for overall easier handling of color filling.

However, if you duplicate an outline curve letter and cover it partly with a colored rect, then select both and perfrom a geometric subtraction operation, you will be leaved with the inner part of the coresponding letter (switch to the node tool and delete possible unwanted parts/node). Which you can then in turn place inside the outline letter curve and group etc.

 

[Stace]

Thanks.

A geometric subtraction disappears both layers.

Do you mean a geometric intersection? When I try it out, that's the only one of the geometric functions that fills the letter, but then my red letter fill turns to black. (Which can easily be changed back to red, but it's an extra step.) 

[v_kyr]

Nope, first select the outline layer (place that above the rect layer) then as second the color rect layer, then subtract ...

 

[Stace]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

When I put a black curve (made from text) above a red rectangle, select both and hit subtract, this is what I get.

The thing I didn't understand from your initial instruction: Why 'partly' cover the curve in a rectangle? Surely the entire inside of the letter needs to be covered by the red?

 

[v_kyr]

40 minutes ago, Stace said:

Why 'partly' cover the curve in a rectangle? Surely the entire inside of the letter needs to be covered by the red? 

No, since if you cover too much with the rectangle you won't get only the finer inner part you are only interesting in.

Left side, just a small covered rect gives you exactly the inner part after a subtract. Right side with a big covered rect gives you much more, you won't possibly want be leaved with for an inner fill effect ...

Since otherwise you may have difficulties to remove all those possibly unneeded nodes (for what is shown on the right side here), if you just wanted to be leaved with the inner red "I" part ...

... thus just covering partly enough of the inner transparent area of an outline letter gives you here just that what you need as an inner fill. For other letters like "A", "K" ... and so on you can't cover them like that "I" and so you would afterwards have to remove unwanted node parts.

However, I would instead use similar looking normal fonts (not outline fonts) and then apply a bigger stroke or fx border around them in order to make them look like an outline style. That's much easier and quicker to do!

[Stace]

Sorry, I'm just not getting this.

Thanks for trying.

 

 

[v_kyr]

Didn't you wanted to fill the inner transparent part of those outline font letters or do you wanted just to give the outer black outline a different color?

[Stace]

I want to fill the inner transparent path.

Giving the outer black outline a different colour is easy -- just change colour of the fill, right?

[v_kyr]

Yes! - And as added above in my last post, you can also get an filled outline effect much easier with usual fonts here, so you won't need a real outline font if you want to fill that anyway.

[Stace]

Yeah, I really like this particular font though -- I want to give the project cohesion by using only the fonts in this family. Normally when I buy a font package the outline version matches the fill version exactly, in which case you just lay the outline font on top of the fill font, boom, done. But this time, for some bizarre reason, the font designer has offset them just enough so that this is impossible. 

It's 40 degrees here, my brain is not working. 

[v_kyr]

Ah Ok, well if you have both a fill and an outline version of a font and they fit nicely together in this way, that's then easy to do. But if you don't have a filled version it's much more work to get that one then filled here. Thus when you will fill it anyway, it's overall easier to just use the filled font and give that a surrounding outline effect (via wide stroking or an outside border).

[Stace]

That is true. That is what I shall do.

If filling the outline version was an easy option, that was going to give me one more font option in my tool kit. 

Plus, I wondered if there was an easy way to do it. More skills are always good. I have concluded that it's possible, as you've shown, but I can't be bothered with the hassle, haha