[Courses][gimp] Lesson 3: Introduction to Layers and Text

[Akkana Peck]

Patricia Peck writes:
> Is there a way of selecting a piece of 
> text and deleting just that text, like for example if you had an extra word?

In gimp 1, there isn't; text just becomes pixels like any other
graphics, unless you're using the "Dynamic Text" option (I never
used dynatext much, so I can't say much about how that works).

In gimp 2, if you right-click on the layer in the layers dialog,
the first item, "Text Tool...", will bring up the little text
dialog, where you can change the text.

(I'm glad you asked that; I didn't know how to do that either,
though I was pretty sure it was possible.  Now I know!)

> And say, what was the floozy font you used for your card.  The fonts 
> I've tried aren't so great, and it's hard to tell in that little 
> dialogue box with just Aa as an example.

I was afraid someone was going to ask that. :-)

One danger I forgot to warn you all about is that once you start
making little cards like this, you run an extreme risk for becoming
a font addict.  Most systems come with only basic boring fonts
installed, and of course for cartoons and cards you want the
perfect bloopy or curvy font that looks good scaled way up.
But once you start searching the web for free fonts, you find
so many you want to try that you end up spending hours going
crosseyed going through hundreds of fonts.

Fonts most often come packaged as a .zip file, since they're
intended for Windows users, but most Linux systems handle zip
files just fine.  Stick it in a directory somewhere (I'd recommend
making a new directory just for unpacking fonts, since zip files
usually have various readmes and things associated with them)
and run unzip fontname.zip.  This will probably give you
fontname.ttf.  Installing a ttf font on linux so that X sees it
can be fairly difficult and is very distro-specific; but happily,
you want the font primarily for gimp, all you have to do is
mkdir ~/.fonts
and stick the fontname.ttf files in there.

The particular font I used in this card is called "Running Shoe".  
I think I got it here: http://www.acidfonts.com/

> Also, if I wanted something on the card to do this
>                                                    and this
> 
>                                                              and this,
> 
> In order to move each of them to just the right place, would I have to 
> keep each "and this" as a separate layer?

The text tool (in gimp 2, anyway) will let you enter multiple lines,
so you could try hitting return and a lot of spaces.  But if they
don't line up exactly the way you want, you might have to make
three layers to get the alignment exactly the way you want it.

You can combine layers together, or move them together while keeping
them separate; I'll be talking about layer operations like that
in a future lesson (probably not too far in the future).

	...Akkana