I wanted to make a font bold for a narrow application - a logo - and the font provided doesn't have a Bold implementation. As a result I simply added a stroke to the characters to 'bolden' them and went with that. It looks great in Inkscape, but when I print it or convert it to another format, the result is inconsistent. In some cases, it seems to fatten the characters way beyond my intentions. In other cases - a PDF, for example - the fill and stroke seem to be offset, leading to a poor result.

Can someone explain to me what is happening here? I checked elsewhere in this forum, and there were suggestions that include some 'black magic' for bolding font, but I would like to understand why my approach doesn't work, as it seems to be the most straight forward way to accomplish this goal.

Thanks.

When it looks good in Inkscape, I'd change the text to paths before printing. See if that helps.

Otherwise we would need to see some examples, including the SVG file for testing, to investigate what's happening (if you want that kind of assistance). But td's suggestion should probably do the trick.

See this FAQ #C.11. Some fonts can't be bolded or italicized

Thanks very much for your quick reply. It has taken me a little time to respond since I have been trying to reproduce what I did.

The bottom line, is that I am able to recreate the font, and adding a stroke to it increases the weight and it appears to scales nicely. It also converts to other formats and prints consistently - so, no problems. The original logo font that I created still, however, does not print well and has the problem that I described earlier. Converting it to a path doesn't help. I don't know what I did to cause the original to behave badly, but ...

If you would like to see the SVG file that is creating the problems, I would be happy to forward it to you. For now I am able to proceed, and I can't reproduce the actions that led to the original problem.

Cheers

Feel free to attach the problem file... a solution might help others in the future.