Letterpress effect through PSTricks or Tikz

Question

I have already typed in the META section of the website a post addressing the question as to how the letterpress (or engraving-like) effect in the headers of the site had been achieved. I know it can be done with vector graphics GUI-driven software (such as Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator and those of their ilk). I do not despise those applications at all (rather on the contrary), but I do my graphic work with PSTricks or Tikz (or even Asymptote) for precisely the same kind of reasons that I use TeX-based typesetting systems, as opposed to other high-quality systems such as Adobe InDesign or Quark.

Somebody at the META section suggested that maybe I should ask about this point in this section, and here I am. Anyone could say if there is a way that such an effect can be done with our beloved packages (those I have mentioned above)? Of course, it can be done going to the PostScript level, but I'm asking about a more direct way that is already available.

EDIT: Alan's answer below works fine. We get a letterpress effect indeed, but I believe it is not the same kind of effect that has been achieved in the header. Caramdir has answered in the METAsection that it was not done on TeX -- I understand he means it was done with some GUI-driven application. Anyone knows how to do this with code based on PSTricks, Tikz or Asymptote?

Answer 1

Here's a pure TikZ/PGF version. Needs a bit of work to get the effect as good as the original image. It uses a couple of bits of code from the TeX-SX launchpad: the letter shape package and the shadow blur package (note: there's a minor modification of this compared to the pgf-blur package on CTAN).

The idea is to draw the letter with a shadow but to have the shadow drawn on top of the letter rather than under it to give the effect that it is the surrounding paper that is causing the shadow rather than the letter. The shapes.letter tikzlibrary is needed to define paths corresponding to letters and the pgf-blur library is for the blurred shadow.

Given those two packages, here's the code to produce the effect:

\documentclass{article}
%\url{http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/62570/86}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{shapes.letters,shadows.blur}

\pgfkeys{
  /pgf/letter/.cd,
  load font={stikz}{normal},
  size=4,
  load encoding=char,
}

\makeatletter
\tikzset{
  use letter path/.code={%
    \pgfscope
    \pgftransformscale{\letter@size}%
    \letter@path{\letter@encode{#1}}%
    \endpgfscope
  }
}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{scope}
\fill[red!70!black,use letter path=T];
\path[blur shadow,shadow blur base colour=white,use letter path=T];
\begin{scope}[shift={(2cm,-.8cm)}]
\fill[red!70!black,use letter path=E];
\path[blur shadow,shadow blur base colour=white,use letter path=E];
\end{scope}
\begin{scope}[shift={(4.1cm,0)}]
\fill[red!70!black,use letter path=X];
\path[blur shadow,shadow blur base colour=white,use letter path=X];
\end{scope}
\path (current bounding box.north west) ++(-1,1)  (current bounding
box.south east) ++(1,-1);
\clip[use letter path=T] (current bounding box.north west) rectangle
(current bounding box.south east);
\clip[shift={(2cm,-.8cm)},use letter path=E] (current bounding
box.north west) rectangle (current bounding box.south east);
\clip[shift={(4.1cm,0cm)},use letter path=X] (current bounding
box.north west) rectangle (current bounding box.south east);
\fill[blue,rounded corners] (current bounding box.north west)
rectangle (current bounding box.south east);
\end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

And here's the result (I didn't spend any time getting the colours right):

Answer 2

needs pdflatex -shell-escape or latex->dvips->ps2pdf

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{auto-pst-pdf}% for running it with pdflatex -shell-escape
\usepackage{pst-light3d}
\DeclareFixedFont{\Sf}{T1}{fxb}{b}{n}{2cm}
\begin{document}

\psframebox[framesep=5mm,fillcolor=black!20,fillstyle=solid]{%
  \PstLightThreeDText[fillstyle=solid,fillcolor=white,linestyle=none,
    LightThreeDYLength=0.1]{\Sf \rule[-0.75cm]{0pt}{2.5cm}Letterpress}}

\psframebox[framesep=5mm,fillcolor=black!20,fillstyle=solid]{%
  \PstLightThreeDText[fillstyle=solid,fillcolor=black!70,linestyle=none,
    LightThreeDYLength=-0.07,LightThreeDColorPsCommand=pop 1 setgray,
    LightThreeDXLength=0]{\Sf \rule[-0.75cm]{0pt}{2.5cm}Letterpress}}

\end{document}

Answer 3

You can achieve a poor-man's letterpress effect by using text with a slight shadow set on an appropriately coloured background. This is how the effect is implemented in CSS. In this example I've used TikZ only to produce the background. The shadows are produced with the nice shadowbox package, first announced in this question:

How to create text with shadows?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[svgnames]{xcolor}
\usepackage{shadowtext}
\usepackage{tikz}
% fontspec requires LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}
\newcommand\HUGE{\fontsize{2cm}{2cm}\selectfont}
% The regular shadowtext command to set colours is \shadowcolor
% but the command allows input only in rgb triples
% The following command allows for xcolor named values to be used
% and is much more convenient
\makeatletter
\newcommand\setshadowcolor[1]{\colorlet{st@shadowcolor}{#1}}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\shadowoffsety{1pt}
\shadowoffsetx{0pt}

\begin{tikzpicture}
\node[fill=black!50,minimum height=3cm] 
     {\setshadowcolor{black!30}\shadowtext{\bfseries\HUGE Letterpress}};
\begin{scope}[yshift=3cm]
\node[fill=black!40,minimum height=3cm] 
     {\setshadowcolor{black}\shadowtext{\color{white}\bfseries\HUGE Letterpress}};
\end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

(The image doesn't look very nice because of the conversion to .png.)