Expanding text for vinyl cutting

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
January 8, 2018
2 replies
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I have a small sign company in Alaska, and I have been pretty much forced to get a new laptop and change from Corel to Adobe. I'm trying to just figure out how to make a drop shadow around text, that will cut both the original text lines and the new drop shadow. There must be a technical name for this but It's not coming to me. Please help!

vinyl cutting

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JETalmage

Inspiring

JET

barbara_a7746676

Community Expert

I've not prepared art for vinyl cutting, but I assume that a drop shadow for that use would be a hard drop shadow, not a soft shadow that fades from dark to light. Going on that assumption, you could do the following:

Type the text.

Duplicate it and offset it. I filled the bottom piece of text with black.

Select both pieces of text with the Selection tool and Type > Create Outlines.

In Pathfinder, choose Merge. That will delete the top text area from the drop shadow area and unite all of the objects with the same color.

This is what it looks like in View > Outline so you can see the results. Before merge on left, after merge on right. All the paths will be grouped.

That is going to give you an exact cut out, but you may need some overlap. To do that, ungroup. Select all of the drop shadow paths and Object > Path > Offset Path.

You will end up with two paths for the shadow. Shown below in outline view.

If you need to combine the two shadow paths, select the shadow paths. If there's nothing else on the artboard, you can select one of the shadow pieces and choose Select > Same Appearance or Same Fill Color.