project home page
• introduction
• background & more information
finding the images you need
• on-line galleries
• scanning
• making your own
• taking your own
digital image sizes
• digital image sizes
• resolution
• file size
• e-mail
• copyright
adding images to documents
• position
• cropping
• enhancement
• paper size
• posters
image file types
• jpg or gif
• transparency
screen prints and clip art
• screen prints
• clip art
the problems with text
• fonts
• line length
• emphasis
• text boxes
• text images
free tools
• text
• drawing
• image editing
• web page design

Enter the text (somewhere different to where it is to be displayed) and press Copy.
Click where it is to go and use Edit|Paste Special, selecting Paste as a Picture (Enhanced Metafile).
It will then be an image in the document rather than formatted text and should appear
as you require even if the user hasn’t got that font or style feature.

If you want to save the image as a separate gif or jpg file for future use or inclusion
in a web page then either type or paste it into a PowerPoint slide. You may have to
fiddle around with the slide size (File|Slide or Page Setup) and text size but the object
is to make the slide act as a ‘container’ or border for your text so as little border
as you can manage is ideal.

Then use File|Save as to store the slide as either a jpg or gif file – these can be found
by scrolling down the file types. This is a little known but quite effective way of creating
graphics and saving them for future use as files in their own right even when you have
no ‘proper’ image editing software available.

This single character was created using the first ‘outline only’ setting with Times New Roman. In Format Wordart, select Fill and choose Texture. Remove the outline. Lastly a simple embossed shadow effect was added using the Shadow tool on the Drawing Toolbar

This delightful effect was created again using the first ‘outline only’ option in the WordArt gallery. In the Fill options, use Picture and browse for a suitable image. Some will work, some won’t. The AV button on the WordArt panel allows the characters to be squeezed (or expanded).

For web pages, and when you wish to use a font or style that may not appear as intended on another user’s computer, turning text into an image can be useful. This is probably simplest in a drawing program like Serif Draw Plus but if you’re stuck then you can use Paint or try the ideas illustrated here.

WordArt

Used properly, this old Word tool can be extremely effective. Used badly – and the panel of options rather encourages some horrid waves and shapes reminiscent of children’s first posters in the early 1990s – and the results will be awful.

You can have a lot of fun with WordArt and using really big font sizes for a few words can create very good document covers almost instantly.