Monday, July 12, 2010

Progress - Multicolored text layers in GIMP

Hello again,

Before I vanish to study to some more unexpected tests here is a small update on multi-colored text layers. mitch (Michael Natterer) has fixed up a patch, which now allows the text core to render multicolored text! Until now, text in GIMP was rendered as an alpha mask for a color layer which prevented my patch from being any good. The original reason for this, was to avoid having to handle images with different color modes (indexed/whatever) by rendering only the shape as a mask.

So, I tried my patch again today. It works, if you want gray text :D I have some issues with the conversions, but the patch basically works.
I did say it basically works - even if it's not the color you expected :D
For those of your who want to try this out, here is the bug report Bug 620674 - Adding support for multi-colored text layer. There are two patches attached - one patch by me which adds the functionality in the gui/core for specifying several colors in one layer, and the other patch (by mitch) which enables rendering of the text-layout itself instead of using it as a mask on a color layer.
Download both patches to the directory with the source of GIMP, and run the following commands in bash:
cd GIMP_SOURCE_DIRECTORY # replace with the actual path
patch -p1 < MITCH_PATCH # replace with the actual path to the patch file
patch -p1 < MY_PATCH # replace with the actual path to the patch file
Now re-compile GIMP and enjoy =)
The color selection yields the wrong colors (bright shades of gray) but it works.

I'll be back next week hopefully, but it may take a bit more time (Big exams...)

p.s.
I see that a very big fraction of the readers of this blog are from Russia - so спасибо! (For English speakers, that's thanks in Russian)

3 comments:

  1. Hi,

    My name is steve and i do a blog on Calligraphy via GIMP and Inkscape. I greatly appreciate the work you are doing on the text tool in GIMP. Many years ago I used to work in Corel draw / photopaint and they had very impressive text tools. Rolf from meetthegimp recently posted a piece on my calligraphy

    http://meetthegimp.org/calligraphy-mostly-in-gimp/

    http://steveczajka.posterous.com

    Contact me if you need some user feedback.

    Cheers
    Steve

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Steve. I already saw your work on meet-the-gimp and It's amazing!

    I have a test in two weeks (an extermly hard test that is) and that's why I'm a bit unactive. However, I'll try to find some time for working on the multicolored text patch now that I see that there are more people (other than me) interested in it =)

    Thanks again for the feedback!

    ReplyDelete