The author’s Howard Peteillustrates a black outlined font printed with a gold- colored fill (above left). Letters were trimmed to the outline and applied individually using spray adhesive. Close up of the Pete’s headrest. The Pete’s markings were done using Microsoft software, which has tools for bending the
right, starting with the third box from the left. This should show the name of the font you selected earlier—this is the font selector box. Clicking on this will open up a list of all the available fonts so that you can try anoth- er if you wish.
You may well ask, “Why did you have me go though all that rigamarole with the Font Book thingy if I could just select the font in this box?” Ah, because you can only see the full alphabetic and numeric range in the Font Book. When you are searching for the perfect font, you will be so glad I made you do that. You will be a pro. Okay, back to work. Next to the Font selector box will be a box that allows you to select from a variety of standard font modifications, such as “bold”, “light”, “oblique”, etc. Experiment with these a bit—“bold” can be very useful in par- ticular. Next up, you’ll see a window with a number in it and a downward arrow to its right—this is the font size selector. Click on the arrow, and you’ll see standard choices, typically starting at 8 or 9 and going up to 144 or 288.
But wait! You are not necessarily limited to these sizes! Double click on the box with the number in it and you can delete the number that’s there and type in whatever size you want, including half-sizes. Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere! With any luck, at some point after exploring these options you have gotten close to the font style and size you need.
Let’s go a bit further. Continuing to the right, there is a black rectangle—well, it’s whatever color your typed letters are cur- rently. This is the font color selector. Click- ing on this brings up a palette of different colors. You want red lettering? Click on one of the red boxes and your type will be red. If they don’t have just the color you want, note at the bottom of this palette window it says “show colors”. Click on this, and try experi- menting with the several different options here. The round “color wheel” is quite use- ful—move the slider on the right up and down to adjust the lightness (tint) or dark- ness (shade) of any color. Tap in the wheel itself to select different hues.
Spend some time here and get acquainted with how to “mix” different colors to your liking, because the next toolbox item (mov-
FLYING MODELS
text over a curve. Again, black outline with a gold colored fill, but this time the word “Pete” is applied whole, as a tissue decal (above right). If you trim close to the letters, the tissue decal blends nicely against the main body and the “extra” is almost invisible.
ing to the right again) uses the same palette tools, and can be very handy. This box shows an “a” with a line across it. This is the back- ground color selector. Click on it, and you will again see the color palette, only this time you are using it to control the back- ground color of your type.
So, let’s imagine you want yellow letters on a red background. You go to the font color selector and click on yellow. You go to the background color selector and click on red. Voilà! So now, when you have a model with a red rudder and complicated fancy lettering in yellow, you know one thing you can try: print a custom decal on white tissue using the method we just described, having taken a bit of time to figure out which background red best matches the red tissue in which you covered the rudder.
I have one more neat trick to show you. Highlight the text on your page—you can do this by pressing and holding “command” and “a” on your keyboard. Now right click with your mouse—you’re looking to bring up a di- alog box that has, among other options (cut, copy, paste, spelling, proofreading, etc.), an option called “font”, with an arrow pointing to the right. Select this and a secondary window will open with options to “show font”, “bold”, “italic”, “underline”, and...wait for it...outline.
For some reason, whereas all these other options are available in the toolbar at the top (just to the right of the background color selector), outline is only available here. This nifty tool allows you to create an outlined font. Joy! Now you can create things like yel- low registration numbers outlined in black. In this case, the font color controls the out- line color; the background color controls the fill color within the outline. This is all very handy for printing on tissue, where you plan to cut out the numbers/letters individually and attach them like decals to your model. One thing you can’t do in Pages (or, at least I haven’t figured out how to yet) is to create a fill color that is different than the background color—so, for instance, black- outlined letters with a yellow fill against a red background. Nor can you control the width of the outline.
Now, all you clever Windows fans will be jumping up and down at this point and say- ing “We can! We can!” Yes, you can....but we’ve no more space left in this column for exploring that! If FM doesn’t fire me for writing such a wretchedly boring column as this one (for nothing is worse than a step-by- step explanation of keystrokes), I will go into how to do all this on a Windows comput- er in the near future.
PHOTO: VANCE GILBERT
Vance Gilbert’s nifty 26-inch Dewoitine D33 sports a bit of fancy fin filigree. Inkjet printing on pre-painted surfaces can be tricky; much depends on the paint used as to whether or not the ink will take well.
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