Glowing Text

Click on these pictures to see a larger version...	... and read this text to learn how to create this effect.
	First, create an object to make glow. It helps if it is a solid colour, but it's not essential. I created a white text object, and then made a mask out of it. Save your mask now, so that you can restore it later.
	Next, enlarge your mask, and feather the edges of it. Picture Publisher has a handy "Feather mask" option. I feathered the mask by 20 pixels, setting the edge to normal and the direction to outsite. The same effect could be achieved with other packages by enlarging the mask, and giving it a fading alpha channel.
	I then filled my mask with a strong red colour. It is important to make sure you have the correct object selected at this point; I forgot to select the base object initially, and accidentally coloured all by text red! Good job we have "Undo"...
	I then reloaded my original mask. (In Picture Publisher I could have used the Mask->Undo action.) I feathered the mask again, but only by 10 pixels this time. I then filled it with yellow.
	Lastly, I restored the original mask, and feathered it by just 4 pixels. I then fill it with plain white, just to take the edge off the original white image, producing this groovy glowing text. Does it remind you of a lightbulb...? If you try this technique yourself, you might will probably want to adjust the feather size to suit the text size better. The smaller the text, the less of a glow there should be.
	But glows are more versatile than that. I produced this text, based on the "Heart of Darkness" computer game logo, by simply filling using dark purple, light purple and white instead of red, yellow and white respectively. I also gave the text a purple to black gradient fill, to make the text kind of cool.
	This logo I made for the site under its old name is created in a similar way. The logo is two text objects, each glowing blue. The glow is also its own objects, allowing me to group and rearrange components until I got the look right. The "Weaver" object also has a weaved pattern overlayed, fading towards the left.