Help! Keynote - Trying to add a black outline to a font for readability

Welcome to the Forum.

I have tried to do this with minimal success using the Shadow effect with a very small offset and blur. sometimes it will be OK, but not in all situations - especially when the text is over a complex photograph or one with colors similar to the text itself.

What I have found works better is to use the Shapes menu to create a rectangle that is exactly the same size as the text block, place it behind the text but in front of the picture, and then reduce the Opacity of the rectangle until it is visible just enough to provide definition to the text but not be seen as a "mask." A black rectangle under white or yellow text seems to work best, but you can experiment with other colors to find a combination that is most appropriate for your slides.

Good luck

Don't forget that there are countless free and $ fonts available on-line. Just google some to find them. I'm sure that you'll find a suitable "outline" font among them.

Your present collection already inludes "Princeton", but, of course, this is hardly suitable for general use.

I do the same as Ron, but I reduce my offset to zero. This way, the letter has a even glow all the way around.

One workaround is to create your text, then copy and paste the text to create a second copy. Select all the text in the copy, then in the Format menu, under the Font flyout menu, choose "Outline". This will change the text so that it is empty but for the letter outlines, which will be in the text colour chosen. Set the text colour to black, and then move the outlined text on top of the original text. You should now have the original text with a black outline around it.

As far as I can determine, there is no way to set the thickness of the outline, and the process itself is a bit cumbersome, so this isn't ideal, but it produces reasonable results.

If you have Photoshop you can outline text.

When making outline text in Photshop you can choose so that the outline is outside the text. There three options; outside, center and inside the text.

Save as a Photoshop pdf. Open Preview, do a save as. For some reason Photoshop adds to the file size when making a pdf. Preview will make the pdf at least 10 time smaller in file size.

Import into Keynote.

One benefit in making a pdf is that the text is still a victor object and not a graphic. Meaning, you can enlarge the text without lose in image quality.

I forgot about Skitch.



It's a free download as it's still in public beta, but you can use it to create text like the above. Actually, depending on exactly what you're doing, you may be able to do all the setup of the image WITH the text in Skitch.

http://www.skitch.com

Here's one more app that can do it. DrawIt Lite



http://www.getdrawit.com/