Create engraved text effects online

Let me tell you a little bit about P2P engraved text effects. They were published a few time ago, and I have been receiving a very positive feedback from users, because they are powerful and very easy to use.

These fresh Realistic Engraved Text Effects can create very eye catching results and have very useful configuration possibilities, including some advanced options, like:
- engrave deepness;
- light direction;
- engrave style (full engrave or just the outline);
- irregular damaged borders;
- plate with rounded corners.

There are many engraved text effect themes, like, for example:
- Engraved Cracked Text Effects;
- Engraved Concrete Text Effects;
- Engraved Metallic Text Effects;
- Engraved Ice Text Effects.

The full list is big, but I can tell currently the most popular engraved text renderes are the Engraved Stone Text Effects, the Engraved Wood Text Effects and the Engraved Sand Text Effects. Despite these are very new softwares, they are getting more and more popular fast. The first one, for example, already is the 4th result in Google for search expression "engraved stone text effect".

To choose among all themes, you just need to go to the Realistic Engraved Text Effects page. Below I show you two examples of high quality engraved text effects created online by using theses generators. The second sample was created by using the option "Engraved borders".

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Understanding Unicode characters

In a previous post, I have talked about my adventures trying to understand and implement character encodes used to represent Unicode strings.

Despite it needs much more tests, I have been successfully implementing a library that can understand and manipulate strings in the following Unicode representations:
- UTF8;
- UTF16-LE;
- UTF16-BE;
- UTF32-LE;
- UTF32-BE.

By implementing the encodes above, I will automatically be able to deal with other simpler standards, like for example:
- Latin 1;
- UC2;
- UC4.

But what does it all mean? It means I will understand the binary encode of Unicode strings, or, in other words, I will know what code points a string represents. Code points are unique numbers representing characters or symbols.

It's pretty nice, but it's just half the way to go. Since I have the code points of a string, I know for sure what it should mean, but I don't know how the related chars or symbols look like. There is a long and hard way for a complete solution.

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Realistic embossed text effects online

A big amount of visitors is already using P2P embossed text effects. It has been used not just by a big number of frequent visitors, but this new software has attracted a lot of new users. To give you a small idea about what I mean, I can tell our new text effect creators were released online two weeks ago, but even so the Realistic Embossed Text Effects page already is in 14th position in Google search for expression "embossed text effect".

These fresh online embossed text generators have several advanced but easy to use configuration parameters and produce realistic texts. Moreover, you have hundreds of of text effects grouped in various themes like grunge, glass, sand, ice, cracked, concrete, wood, metallic and much more.

Below I show you some examples of realistic embossed text effects created by using these new P2P softwares. The embossed sand text effect is particularly interesting. The used font face is not holed; the effect you see was created by using an interesting feature called "Embossed Borders".

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Text effect tutorials (16)

Here you have the text effect tutorials I have posted last month at the blog about Online Text Effects Tutorials.

- a tiger fur text effect;
- a stone text effect;
- a stylized text made of wild plants;
- a 3D candy text effectt;

If you try these nice effect tutorials, you get these amazing results:

You don't need to wait for this digest published monthly. Subscribe to the Text Effect Tutorials feed.

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Realistic carved text effect generators

I have made the second biggest release in P2P history. These new softwares come to fit the requests of many users since the project is online and endorses Picture to People as the world's best and biggest portal of free graphic effects.

Now P2P has more than 940 awesome carved text effects online. They were divided in two groups:

- Realistic Embossed Text Effects (sculpted out);
- Realistic Engraved Text Effects (sculpted inside or "digged").

These fresh text effects have many useful and advanced features, like the ones I cite below, always keeping the high quality and anti-aliased drawing:

- configurable carving style (you can emboss/engrave the letters or just their outlines);
- optional sculpting plate with rounded corners;
- configurable emboss/engrave deepness;
- configurable light direction;
- optional text border damage;
- optional transparent background (specially useful when using rounded corners).

Below I show you two samples. The first is a cracked embossed stone text and the second one is an engraved wood text effect.

Choose among all carved text effect themes at the Online Carved Text Effects catalog page.

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Font Effects vs Text Effects

I see many people, including many graphic designers,  using "font effect" (also known as "typography effect" or "typographic effect") and "text effect" as synonymous expressions. Well, for me they mean different things.

A text effect is the creation of a "special text" by using a font face as a guide. The result usually looks complex and very different of what a font can be, despite such result, in most cases, keeps that shape information inherited from the guide font.

A graphic text generated through an effect can look like anything and can have any color distribution. In most cases, it doesn't make sense changing that configuration to any arbitrary set of colors. Usually a text effect is a final product and should be used "like is". You can make small adjusts on it like you would make on a photo (modifying contrast for example).

A font effect is the creation of a kind of "new font" based on a existing one. The result of this process is something that could be a font itself and could even be used as input to generate text effects.

A font defines the shape of letters and must be simple enough to be successfully rendered by using one color (in fact, there will be pixels of other colors in edges if anti-aliasing is present, but that colors never will be different from an intermediate color between the rendering color and the background color). When we apply an effect to a font, we are modifying the shape of letters and maybe their spacing.

If what you need is a simple text created by using a regular font with "interesting modifications", in fact you want to use a font effect. If you think "I would like to create a text with this font, but would be nice if it was a little different", so you want a font effect.

Picture to People offers a very nice set of font effects, and you can choose from more that 450 font faces. If you like typography, you could like to use P2P Online Font Effects. Despite they are font effects, many of them go beyond what you can get by using a regular True Type font (ttf), as you can see in the second and third examples below.

These samples were created by starting from the good old Arial font. First you have a "Dashed Outline Arial font", after you have a "Frozen Arial font" and finally it's a "Smoke Arial font".

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