We have a Silverlight application that shows text over video. Both the text and video can be considered variables. Sometimes we might have a dark video, sometimes a bright video, sometimes a video that has sections of both.
Think of credits at the end of a movie. We want to ensure the end user can always read the text being show over the video. The text is always an overlay on top of the video.
The simple solution is to two show the text twice once in white and once in black with a small offset. This almost works but actually looks a little rough, and takes away from the user experience.
Ideally we would have the text with slight semitransparent glow around the edges. So if the text were white there would be a black glow right around the edges.
Is there a way to do this? Or is there an equal or better work-around?
I’ve done this with the DropShadow pixel shader effect in Silverlight 3. It works nicely, but since the pixel shaders aren’t executed on the hardware, it can have a pretty heavy impact on the performance of the application.
If you wanted to get ambitious, you could write your own pixel shader. Silverlight 3 supports HLSL Shaders.