Drop shadow for text in PGF/Beamer

Question

I want to really put an emphasis on some central piece of text I'm using in a Beamer slide. I'm using tikz and overlay to put it, enlarged, on the center of the page, using the following code:

\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]
  \node[at=(current page.center)] {
    \scalebox{2}{\Huge\texttt{{This is important!}}}
  };
\end{tikzpicture}

Can I add a drop shadow to the letter themselves, so they would look even more emphasized? Is there some other decoration that can be added to the text itself, like a glow, etc.? Or does PGF ignores node text altogether? The text should be in typewriter style, so using special fancy fonts is probably not the solution.

Answer 1

This is a terrible hack, and doesn't really fit your situation exactly, but I'm new to TeX and TikZ. Just an idea to get the ball rolling.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}

\newcommand\importantstuff[3]{
    \node[black!30!white] at (#1+0.1,#2-0.1) {
        \scalebox{2}{\Huge\texttt{#3}} 
    };
    \node at (#1,#2) {
        \scalebox{2}{\Huge\texttt{#3}} 
    };
}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]   
    \importantstuff{4}{0}{This is important!}
\end{tikzpicture} 
\end{document}

---

Edit: Marc van Dongen correctly pointed out I should use font-dependent offsets. And since I was fiddling with the code anyway, I tried blurring the shadow, hillbilly style.

\newcommand\importantstuff[3]{
    \newcommand\xoffset{0.3}
    \newcommand\yoffset{-0.2}
    % Blur
    \foreach \x in {-0.1,0.1} {
        \foreach \y in {-0.1,0.1} {         
            \node[black!20!white] at (#1em+\xoffset em+\x em,#2em+\yoffset em+\y em) {
                \scalebox{2}{\Huge\texttt{#3}} 
            };
        }
    }

    % Main Shadow
    \node[black!40!white] at (#1em+0.3em,#2em-0.2em) {
        \scalebox{2}{\Huge\texttt{#3}} 
    };
    \node at (#1em,#2em) {
        \scalebox{2}{\Huge\texttt{#3}} 
    };
}

Answer 2

@Psirus Your solution isn't what I had in mind. The following automatically picks up the current type size. In your solution the node is always \Huge. It's entirely based on your ideas, but I think it's a bit better to work with if you want different type sizes.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tikz}

\newcommand\importantstuff[3]{
    \draw[every node/.style={scale=2}]
         (#1,#2)            coordinate (text destination)
      ++ (0.125em,-0.125em) coordinate (shadow destination)
         % Blur
         \foreach \x in {-0.025,0.025} {
             \foreach \y in {-0.025,0.025} {
                +(\x em,\y em) node[black!20!white] {\texttt{#3}}
             }
         }
        % Main Shadow
        (shadow destination) node[black!40!white] {\texttt{#3}}
        (text destination)   node {\texttt{#3}};
}

\begin{document}
   \begin{tikzpicture}
   \foreach \offset/\size in {0/Huge,1/small,2/normalsize} {
   \begin{\size}
       \importantstuff{0}{\offset}{This is important}
   \end{\size}}
   \end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Answer 3

If you really want to emphasize your letters, you could try to produce paths out of the glyphs in your text. Either by converting the text to a path in a tool like inkscape. Or you ask Andrew Stacey for his TikZ-path version of the STIX fonts.

Then you can use pgf-blur to add a pretty shadow:

But there's no way this will work directly with text typeset by TeX.