text outline remains

Hi Guys,

I'm driving myself nuts trying to do something that seems like it should be really simple.

I'm trying to have a sentence i.e. 'The Boy sat on the Wall' fade in such a way that some of the words remain i.e. becoming 'The Boy              Wall'. To do this I am duplicating the layer, selecting the text I want to vanish and picking its colour as transparent, then putting a fade on the complete sentence so that it fades out leaving the words on the edited layer showing.

Problem is, the outline of the words I have chosen to vanish remains. When I try to select the outline in the colour picker and choose transparent the fill becomes visible and vica versa. I have tried duplicating the layer, deleting the text I don't want and moving it into the correct position but it's tricky and slow to get it into the exact right position. You can generally perceive some slight movement no matter how much I try with decimal place movement of the layer.

The beauty of my initial plan was that the sentence would still hold its formatting and be identical, and quick to do. But with these outlines it's not working. Can anyone tell me what i'm missing?

Thanks