Er, and that's under the Text tool palette (I keep my tool palettes docked at the top of my screen. If it were floating, it'd probably look something like this:
Mm, yeah, that's worse. :/ Maybe try duplicating your text layer, and making the bottom of the two the colour you want the stroke to be (while leaving the stroke on?)... though, I'm not sure that'd work either since the stroke looks fuzzy too.
Is your anti-alias set to sharp? (I'm trying to reduplicate the fuzziness and I can't, but that's really the only thing I can think of, which probably isn't much help at all.)
Err, now I'm not sure if it's possible in PSP but with Photoshop there's an option to make the stroke be centered, outside or inside. If there's something like that, try outside or whatever your version would be...
Yeah, the stroke feature in PSP is pretty craptastic. It's fixed on inside stroke so that it covers up part of the text rather than sitting outside of it, so it's useless for any text small enough to fit in an icon. It'd look fine at font size 72 or something where losing a few pixels off the edge of the text won't damage the look of it, but for tiny text it's horrible.
You are doing it right - the modify>expand>invert process is the best way (at least that I've found) to get a border on icon text in PSP. I think your problem may be mostly down to the font and angle that you're using. PSP tends to make text a bit blurry when you rotate it, and sharper angles seem to be hit worst. (Notice that your example icon has the text at a much shallower angle than the one you're trying to do.) Because the text is so blurred when you rotate, the gaps inside the letters close up and the black doesn't show through very well from underneath.
Are you rotating the text first and then adding the black border afterwards? If you are, try putting the border on while the text is still horizontal and rotating the text with it already on. That should give you slightly better definition on the letters because the outline will be added before the rotation step makes them blurry.
If you're already doing it that way, or it doesn't improve it enough, try changing to a less chunky font so the gaps inside/around the letters are bigger and won't close up so much when you rotate. If that doesn't work, you may need to reconsider your crop/text position so you can put the text at a shallower angle.
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Is your anti-alias set to sharp? (I'm trying to reduplicate the fuzziness and I can't, but that's really the only thing I can think of, which probably isn't much help at all.)
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I have no idea how or why it is so funky, so I am anxiously awaiting more answers to this post!
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You are doing it right - the modify>expand>invert process is the best way (at least that I've found) to get a border on icon text in PSP. I think your problem may be mostly down to the font and angle that you're using. PSP tends to make text a bit blurry when you rotate it, and sharper angles seem to be hit worst. (Notice that your example icon has the text at a much shallower angle than the one you're trying to do.) Because the text is so blurred when you rotate, the gaps inside the letters close up and the black doesn't show through very well from underneath.
Are you rotating the text first and then adding the black border afterwards? If you are, try putting the border on while the text is still horizontal and rotating the text with it already on. That should give you slightly better definition on the letters because the outline will be added before the rotation step makes them blurry.
If you're already doing it that way, or it doesn't improve it enough, try changing to a less chunky font so the gaps inside/around the letters are bigger and won't close up so much when you rotate. If that doesn't work, you may need to reconsider your crop/text position so you can put the text at a shallower angle.
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