mcgrew's Journal: GIMPy Text

(There's an illustrated copy of this at mcgrew.info)

The GNU Image Manipulation Program is an excellent free and open source graphics program that will do almost anything you want to a bitmap image.

Almost. When text is needed in an image, GIMP is indeed gimpy. Rather than use fonts installed in the computerâ(TM)s operating system, it has its own, very limited set of fonts, and no way to exactly position your text.

The workaround is easy: donâ(TM)t use GIMP for text.

Todayâ(TM)s word processors can all write PDF files, both closed source commercial word processors and open source tools. My favorite is Open Office Write. GIMP can import them as images, and it does an excellent job of it.

Say you wanted to use the above image (a 35 mm slide I took in 1974 and digitized with a cheap plastic slide viewer, a phone, a rubber band, and adhesive tape) and add âoeyour moveâ in the upper left hand corner of the image. First, open your word processor and choose the font you want. Any font installed on your computer will work, and there are literally thousands of fonts you can download from the internet and install in a few seconds. One Iâ(TM)ve downloaded is Callistroke. Weâ(TM)ll use that one for the example, and Iâ(TM)ll explain why shortly.

Once the font is chosen, type in the text and highlight it, center it, and make the font size large enough that it stretches from border to border.

Next, export it as PDF and open GIMP. Once GIMPâ(TM)s stuff has all loaded, you can open the PDF as an image. I simply put it on the last page of this document rather than making a new document. Before you tell GIMP to import it, raise the resolution to 600 DPI or higher to prevent pixelation. You can make it smaller later.

When it opens, select Tools --> Selection Tools --> Rectangle Select, and outline your text.

Now select Image --> Crop to Selection.

The reason I like the outline fonts in most illustrations and graphics is that I can have white letters outlined in black, which will show up clearly in any image. If your text is going to be in a landscape with a blue sky, a non-outline font in a contrasting color is as good or better. Donâ(TM)t use red letters on a green background as it will be invisible to some people.

There are a couple of steps to get there. First, select Tools --> Color Picker. Place your cursor over the white and click. Then choose Tools --> Selection Tools --> Select By Color. Now click anywhere white and press âoeDelâ and everything white will be transparent.

Now, select Select --> None.

Transparent parts will show up as a two shades of gray checkerboard. as in the illustration below.

Now choose Tools --> Paint Tools --> Bucket Fill to fill in the white part of your text.

Now open the image you want to put the text in. There will be a ruler at the top of the screen showing how many pixels in a given area. In our image, where we want the text is about 750 pixels wide. In the text image, select Image --> Scale Image. The following dialog opens:

Place the cursor in the âoeWidthâ field, then type in the number. Weâ(TM)re changing 1024 to 750. Now press âoeTabâ once and the âoeHeightâ field will change. Now just click âoescaleâ.

When it finishes scaling, press Ctrl+A to select the whole image, than Ctrl+C to copy it. Tab to the image youâ(TM)re adding text to, make sure the âoeRectangle Selectâ tool is chosen (see earlier in this article) and press Ctrl+V to paste the text in.

Now put the cursor on a letter and hold the primary mouse button and move the text where you want it.

Now merge the two images by pressing Ctrl+M then Enter. Here is the final image:

You can add all sorts of fancy things to your text with different images.

To make the above image, I got a picture of fire from Google, Wrote the word âoeFIREâ in open office, exported as PDF, selected black (lettering), deleted, and pasted it over the fire.

So finally, GIMP has everything I need. Well, maybe except the ability to make moving PNGs and vector graphics.

I miss...

[Bill Dawg]

...photography as artistic expression.

Have you tried Pinta?

[CCarrot]

Just wondering if you've had the same issues with Pinta [launchpad.net]?

I'm a Winblows user (for now at least) so I haven't tried it myself. Have been casually looking for Linux alternatives to some of my favourite 'helper' programs in preparation to making the swap once Windows 10 becomes 'mandatory', and Pinta seems a possible option to replace Paint.NET [getpaint.net] which I absolutely love...and apparently it runs under WINE [getpaint.net] if you can get it rigged up right, although I don't know if it would grab system fonts. No idea on the capa

Re:

[Qzukk]

Hey, thanks for pointing that out, i was a little bummed when paint.mono stalled out (years and years ago). Pinta looks like the successor to that project.

I used to use Debian Linux as my desktop since the 90's, then switched to Windows largely due to Steam and gaming about 6 years ago. Microsoft's increasing push on upgrading (and installing nosy telemetry even if you don't upgrade) convinced me to switch back about 3 weeks ago, this time to Qubes OS [qubes-os.org]. I figured if everything and their dog wants to invade

Re:

[CCarrot]

Cool, thanks! I'll definitely check out Quebes OS when I'm ready to start field-testing distros!

I think it'll ultimately come down to which one plays better with WINE, since I have some go-to programs that were a) powerful, b) flexible, and c) user-friendly enough in the trial period that I bought them, and use them at least once a week. Video ReDo [videoredo.com] and Duplicate File Detective [duplicatedetective.com] are two that I can think of just off the top of my head, and I haven't seen anything out there to match them, at least for what I

Re:

[Qzukk]

there's always dual boot

If you really really want to, you can run windows 7/8 as a guest VM in Qubes (Qubes is just xen with a layer of tools on top to make managing it much easier). It needs a bit of setup, but it seems to be reasonably well documented (I haven't tried it).

Re:

[Qzukk]

Though immediately after I posted that, I realized that having a windows vm won't help much if you want to dedupe files in one of the other VMs :D

Re:

[CCarrot]

Though immediately after I posted that, I realized that having a windows vm won't help much if you want to dedupe files in one of the other VMs :D

haha, you got that right :) But for video processing the VM might work, hmmm...so many ways to skin those digital cats!

Re:

[mcgrew]

I was rather surprised at how well the install went.

The only distro I ever tried that was hard to install was Red Hat, and that was around 1999 or so when I was dipping my toes in the water. Every other distro I ever sampled was far easier to install than Windows, at least the amount of time and work it took.

Photoshop doesn't do vector graphics either

[damn_registrars]

At least, as far as I know it doesn't - though I haven't use the most recent versions. By my understanding - and my graphic designer wife seems to generally agree with this - is that vector graphics is the domain of Illustrator. While I may be starting to sound like an advertisement, I therefore use Inkscape to do my vector graphics.

You may also know that most presentation software also can do some basic vector graphics functions. This is why some of my less technically savvy colleagues have used power