text outlines

Please consider the following for future development on the skinning engine.

I think a good addition to text shadows would be text outlines. They will especially be very useful for text on backdrops. On very light backgrounds adding shadows to the text will enhance readability a bit, but not enough.
Text outlines coupled with the ability to control the sharpness (or glow) would open up possibilities.

Something along the lines of:

<label>foo</label>
<textcolor>ffffffff</textcolor>
<textoutline size="2" glow="0.5">ff000000</textoutline>

Where adjusting the glow and size would allow variations like below.


greetings,
Jeroen

Yep, that would be awesome !

I would definitely make use of it.

not a bad idea indeed.
kinda similar to how subtitle fonts are rendered maybe?

would be nice if skins could use something like it.

Outline is doable relatively easily (as pointed out, we use it for subs already), though it's quite clunky.

Glow looks as though it needs shader magic to do properly - outline already involves re-rendering the same text over and over, so using a shader might be a faster way to go in general - i.e. have separate shaders for "outline", "shadow", and "glow" effects.

Patches to address this are most welcome

Cheers,
Jonathan

This might be overkill, but could you as a "workaround", put your text in a photoeditor, make the "fill" transparent and put on the shadow effect. Save it as an image, and place it exactly where your text is?

This might be hard with moving text, lol

doestergaard Wrote:This might be overkill, but could you as a "workaround", put your text in a photoeditor, make the "fill" transparent and put on the shadow effect. Save it as an image, and place it exactly where your text is?

and do that again for every language xbmc supports ;-p

Would be nice to have, I would drop current <shadowcolor> attribute and add this

<textshadow size="3" pos="0,2" blur="2">FF000000</textshadow>.

That would allow full freedom to skinners for adding glow, drop shadows etc.