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The heart of Font Fiend's flexibility and power are its' ability to let you layer multiple graphical effects onto a font to create an incredible variety of effects. From the Effects dialog you can click Insert Effect to add another effect to the rendering list. Once added click Edit Effect to bring up a dialog that allows you to change the effect selected. Each effect has three components. First is the region to effect which also implies how the region will be effected when blend type effects are being used. An example might help clarify. Click Insert Effect, Edit Effect and then select the effect region - from the list presented selected Vertical Wipe and click OK. Now select the Colorization type and click interpolate. Click on the little color boxes and select two different colors - say yellow and red. Voila, your font has now been rendered with a splash of yellow blending or interpolating between yellow and red. A complete list of region selectors can be found by clicking the Effect Region button. The region selectors along with descriptions are presented here:

Whole Shape: When you want to apply an effect to a whole shape. Since there is no "direction" to this effect alpha and color interpolization is not available when using this effect.

Vertical Wipe: As seen above, when you want to interpolate from top to bottom across a shape.

Horizontal Wipe: Similar to vertical wipe but moving from left to right across a shape. Vertical font effects are found much more commonly on the web and in games but you are still going to have occasional use for horizontal wipes.

Diagonal UL and UR: Interpolates across the face of a font. Most useful for adding either color or transparency effects for finishing touch-ups on completed fonts.

Horizontal Band: My favorite effect. Many game fonts can't be built with a single vertical wipe because they will have multiple bands of color blends, ie. starting dark and going to a bright color in the middle of the font and then going back to a darker shade that is the same or even different from the starting dark shade. Horizonal band has a handy radio box entitled "Sum prev. percentages" which can be used to keep track of how far down a font face previous horizontal bands have gone. For example, let's say you wanted to create the most common kind of banded font which is a two band font. By setting "Sum prev. percentages" on the starting percentage would automatically be set to 0 so you need only specify how far down you want to go - let's say 45% so we are not creating a symmetrical font. Using Insert Effect from the "Render Effects List" box and then turning that new effect into another horizontal band would show you that the starting percentage for the next band would be set to 45. At this point, if you enter anything greater than 55% then the program will set your trap your entry to 55. You have just created a two banded font. Set the effect to colorization, pick your colors and, voila, you have created an interesting font effect!

Vertical Band: Like horizontal band except that you are creating a band of texture, color or alpha effects across a vertical stripe of the font.

Interior Edges: Interior edges let you apply effects to one or more pixels and one or more sides (top, right, bottom and left). These effects can be used for things like applying a highlight effect to the top of a sprite, a side beveling effect, increasing alpha along the side of an edge, etc.. Glow: The glow effect is generally used, as you might expect, to create a soft alpha channel glow around a font. Usually a glow is created by turning on interpolation for colorization and the alpha channel with the alpha channel interpolating to zero. For example, you can start with deep red interpolating to yellow with an alpha channel of 150 going to 0 to create a fiery halo around your font. Shadow: The shadow effect takes a version of the font image and draws it below and offset from the current image. The x and y offsets allow you to control how far the shadow image is offset from the top image - negative x moves the shadow to the left, negative y moves the shadow above, positive x moves the shadow to the right and positive y moves it down. For example if you wanted a translucent light blue shadow below and to the right of the font image then you could apply an alpha channel of 100, colorize the font with a dark blue color and use the offsets of x = 3 and y = 3.

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