Outline overlapping image with opacity

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Red_Bobcat

Hello. Please help

I've tried searching the forums for an answer but I don't even know the words I'd need to search for.

Basically I'd like to create an image with an outline, both of which have opacity 50% to reveal an image underneath. However, when I set the line thickness to anything higher than Hairline it moves inwards as well as outwards and so you can see it because the main body of the image is also opaque.

Is there a way to set the outline so that it only moves outward from the image and not inward when you increase it's size.

Thank you and sorry if this is in the wrong place or has been answered before. I am very new

RodneyLee

would a box slightly larger than your image placed under your image work?

Red_Bobcat

I did try this, but the problem is it's not a square, it's all sorts of odd shapes and curved lines. If I just make a copy and increase the size then some aspects don't allign up, with gaps between the outline and the image in areas and overlap in others. I could manually moves all the nodes one at a time, but there's going to be hundreds of them across multiple images and that's going to be an excessive amount of work just to outline something. I assumed there must be a work around, I just don't know how

a.l.e

no, controlling the direction of the line is not possible in scribus.

i had a discussion with the inkscape guys and this is something that is hard to do correctly (you might have tried to increase the size of the shape by 10% and were probably unsatisfied with the result: for complex shapes, scribus cannot tell what it means to grow towards the outside; growing the line in a specific direction is a similar type of problem; the "hack" would be to to grow outwards in the direction of the line... but we don't have anybody who took the time to program it)

Red_Bobcat

Okay. That's a real shame. I've settled on just not having any colour in the image so the outlines don't have anything to overlap. It's not what I wanted but will do. Thank you all for your responses.

If I have to close this post or delete it now I have no idea how to do that.

Sorry and thank you again

AdmFubar

So you are trying to outline an irregularly shapes image? If you have the image and can share here I have a possible solution.
Using Scribus 1.6.1, openSUSE 15.5
Advanced hobbyist

RodneyLee

another solution would be FUZZ or GLOW, like a drop shadow all around the image, I think that can be done in GIMP and saved a .png to keep transparency

a.l.e

i think that the scripter API misses a command to get the shape points.

adding such a command should be rather easy and, then, it would be possible to move the points with a small python program.

i cannot do it right now, but i might be able do it next week... if you remind me about it...
of course, then, you would need to use a development version of scribus.