I bought the Hidden Power book for PE2 purely to get the "Make Shape of Selection" tool. And it works very well, thank you. Then I spotted the "Text to Shape" tool, which I thought would be handy for sending files to other people without having to worry what fonts they'd got installed. It too works very well, except when you use "faux bold" from the Type Tool toolbar. With this effect applied, Text to Shape comes up with

The command "Make" is not currently available

Bit of a pain, since the font I was using doesn't have a real bold variant. :(

any suggestions?

No bold varient? Set your kerning a point or two wider then rasterize the text and add a stroke to it.

Alternative is to save as a PDF

The problem with rasterizing the text is that it will no longer be a vector, so I lose the ability to smoothly resize it. That's why I want to use Text to Shape in the first place.

And, sorry, I don't understand what you mean by "add a stroke to it". Do you mean manually draw an outline around every letter? Sounds excessive, given that "faux bold" does this for me, and keeps the text as text as well.

The problem isn't how I get a bold effect. It's how do I convert text to a shape after it's been turned bold. It looks like a limitation in the Hidden Tool.

The problem with rasterizing the text is that it will no longer be a vector, so I lose the ability to smoothly resize it. That's why I want to use Text to Shape in the first place.

And, sorry, I don't understand what you mean by "add a stroke to it". Do you mean manually draw an outline around every letter? Sounds excessive, given that "faux bold" does this for me, and keeps the text as text as well.

The problem isn't how I get a bold effect. It's how do I convert text to a shape after it's been turned bold. It looks like a limitation in the Hidden Tool.

I wish I could be of more help, but I don't use PE and am not familiar with the features that are available. Is there no stroke capability in PE? I know there are limitations in Photoshop regarding Faux Bold, but I have managed to work around them by rasterizing and adding a stroked line around the resulting (selected) text.

I never ran into the problem before of using elements type adjustments on a type layer. However, it doesn't work in elements because it doesn't work in Photoshop either -- I just tried it in CS2. Apparently you can't use Faux settings if you are planning to convert to shapes. To some extent this makes sense as Adobe will probably be relying on the font makeup to define the vectors.

What you need is not a better tool (one doesn't exist), but a better font. You have one of two choices:

1. locate a font on the web that can be used as a substitute (there may be problems with certain fonts in PE2, but there are also many libraries of free fonts, like this one: http://www.freemacfonts.com/efonts.htm ).

2. Open a new image, copy the type, make it obscenely large (say 100 times the size you need it), rasterize the type, Make the type into a selection (command/ctrl and click the type layer), and convert the selection to a shape. Once you are done, you can resize the image, and the type will resize with it.

OK?

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the confirmation. The obscene resize trick will certainly work - I was just hoping for something a little more subtle :-)

I actually used the same trick without realizing it when I imported a vector graphic from CorelDRAW Essentials 2 (aka CD 11). I exported it from CD in Adobe Illustrator format, but Elements rasterized it on import. I made the object huge and then used the Selection to Shape tool to re-vectorize it. Worked fine.

Thanks
Kevin

Glad I could provide a satisfactory solution if not the one you wanted. Thanks for the interesting question.