Advanced Thank-You Card
This version of the Thank-You Card template features advanced "inverse knockout" techniques to create a "filled text" style, as well as option groups which provide an ability to choose the backgrounds including the text's "fill".
Creating the Knockout Effect for "Text-Fill"
This is an optional exercise for setting up advanced visual styling in the document as well as a demonstration of possible display issues and how to overcome them in such cases.
What is a Knockout?
In Adobe products Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, a "knockout group" is either a Group or a Layer (Group in InDesign for this set of demos) which has the setting "Knockout Group" applied in the Transparency panel for this document item.
Anything inside this group which has diminished opacity will get 'stamped out' of the artwork below, creating a see-through hole.
By creating a group of one rectangle and one text-frame object in InDesign, setting Knockout Group to ON, and reducing the opacity of the text to zero, now creates a text-shaped hole in the rectangle.
Creating the Fill
The result shown is nothing but one big white rectangle which has the shape of the live-text punched out of it using Knockout Group.
Knockout Group example:
As a technical nuance of using the knockout, it was necessary to wrap the Knockout group in yet another group in order to apply an invisible "Inner Glow" effect and rasterize this artifact - because of an issue it had for browser-display. *
When these are set up accordingly, this is finished off by duplicating the text and bringing the copy to the top of Layer 1, outside of the Group that is being used for knockouts.
The copied text retains its same layer-name
$_Greeting, and remains in the same coordinate position. In its Transparency settings, the Drop Shadow effect is set, to give the text an appearance of extrusion.
Creating Options
Now, when put through the upload process as done in Project #1 ( https://help.graphxserver.io/p/5ops5SFcH7FRVK/Basic-Thank-You-Card ), it will render the same fields on the produced online web-form.
Let's create some options for the "background" of the card's front.
This will be created via a dropdown field which is created by naming items in the template with a special naming convention which begins with the prefix "DRP_".
Likewise for limited options, one can use the radio-button prefix "RAD_" which creates the options as a radio-button field-set.
Copy the rectangle in the bottom of the knockout group, and give all these rectangles names like so:
- `$_DRP_Background_White
- `$_DRP_Background_Black
- `$_DRP_Background_Blue
- `$_DRP_Background_Red
Hide the rectangles and change the color of each one respective to its name. In the end, leave the default one you wish to be visible, but hide all the other rectangles from this set in this group.
Now, upload this new template to the Virtual Proofs list interface.
In the produced dialog, there should be a new Dropdown control with the label "Background". In it there are the four different options, and the one that was left visible is the default. So if the users do not ever touch this control when filling out the form, it will still get the default option.
When this is tested, the background rectangle according to the picked option will become revealed.
Congratulations, you have created an art-generation engine!
Challenge: Replace the Text-Fill Image
Replacing the Fill Image with a new File
To make the <pasted graphic> text-fill image dynamic, simply give it a name such as
$_Custom Text Fill and this will make the image a variable-graphic.On the Virtual Proof form-test dialogs, the Art-Selector dialog can be a useful repository of commonly-used backgrounds, which could be picked for use as the text-fill.
Changing the Fill Image with Options
In practice, it would be a better use for this scenario to utilize the options and constrain the choices to an available list of background images for the text-fill.
Use multiple pasted images similarly as the rectangles, by giving them a different option-group name and calling the options as whichever you'd like.
Combining Custom Image with Options
For ultimate control, it is possible to leverage both the variable-image field and the options-group.
Simply paste one of the images into the top of the layer and group it with a clear path such as an unstroked and unfilled rectangle. Give the image the variable name
$_Custom Text Fill, but give the container group the name $_Text Fill Option_Custom .Now, the variable-image will only be revealed on the art template (on the web-form, everything is still visible) when the "Custom" option is chosen.Otherwise, the text-fill background is going to be from one of the pre-configured pasted graphics. This is a versatile method for allowing some variability while maintaining the general course of the style.
* All the colors seemed to work fine both in Acrobat (the truest view) and the browser, except for.. Black - to make it show up in the browser without, it was necessary to add the Inner Glow with 0 percent opacity for the wrapper group AND to drag all the bounding boxes to be outside of the PDF's page, in the bleed-zone, and unsightly white lines went away even in the browser.
